


White Oleander

by LiaS0



Category: Far Cry (Video Games), Far Cry 5
Genre: Action/Adventure, Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Canon Universe, Canon-Typical Violence, Character Death Fix, Deviation From Canon, Enemies to Friends to Lovers, Eventual Romance, F/M, Fix-It, Gaslighting, Multi, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Psychological Trauma, Romance, Thriller
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-07-13
Updated: 2018-09-13
Packaged: 2019-06-09 23:45:01
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 7
Words: 30,711
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15278856
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LiaS0/pseuds/LiaS0
Summary: "Are you still so afraid, Evie?" John Seed wondered."...Yes.""You don't have to be anymore." He pushed his forehead into the gun, and he smiled. Even bound as he was, there was that god damn smile, like he'd just heard the punchline to a remarkably good joke. "Everyone knows that when you're the one behind the gun, you don't have any reason to be afraid."-Evie Kincaid was just trying to get to Missoula to finalize her divorce.She wasn't expecting to break down just on the outskirts of Hope County.She wasn't expecting to be found by John Seed and his degenerate men.Nor was she expecting to have an apparent likeness to Joseph Seed's deceased wife.Through God, all things are possible, or so Joseph says. Evie figures they'll just have to see about that.Action, adventure, violence, a deputy that really doesn't have time for this shit, and a wayward traveler caught in the wrong place at the wrong time.





	1. 1988 Mitsubishi Mighty Max

Chapter 1:

            The truck broke down outside of the worst town Evie could have ever imagined.

            Worst was, it couldn’t truly be considered a town. It seemed to be a gas station, a small convenience mart, and a couple of houses before it stretched out into what appeared to be nothing but trees on trees on trees. The gas station was closed for the night. The convenience mart shut up shop at seven every evening except for Sundays; Sundays meant an early closing at five.

            Great.

            She thought about moping for a bit as her cell phone died and the small, blinking ‘x’ that indicated no service kept blinking insistently. There were no wall outlets on the outside of the two buildings, and she didn’t want to try her luck with the houses. They looked abandoned, in truth, with windows boarded up and no cars in the driveway. It was a bleak sort of place –what’d the last mile marker sign said? Hope County?

            GPS made it seem like Missoula was just a few hours away. Missoula, to finish signing her marriage away, along with the few dreams she’d bothered to make in between first kisses and last fights. At least she got to keep the dog. He was home in Portland.

            She leaned back in her seat as far as a truck seat could lean, and she kicked her feet up on the dash; it was going to be a long night waiting for that gas station to open up. She had a crummy romance novel in the jockey box, a half-finished sudoku somewhere underfoot, and if she was lucky then the coke that’d sat in the cup holder wasn’t _too_ stale. Besides, it was a nice night. Sequestered out in the middle of nowhere wasn’t so bad when every star in the sky was visible to the naked eye, blanketed in a rich blue so dark it was black. The moon was full, fat and bright. Hell, once the phone died, she’d still be able to read if she was awake by then.

            Grace came with the approach of a couple of white trucks. While Evie wouldn’t have wept in relief by any means –the sudoku puzzle was _just_ getting interesting –she did feel a stab of something much like it in the same place she’d felt a stab of cold shock when her soon to be ex-husband had set the papers on the dining room table in front of her.

Her window got stuck halfway unrolled, but by the time a man in his early thirties made it to her, she managed to get it down the rest of the way. He had a smile like a secret, and he stood too close to the door. He reeked of gunpowder and leather.

            “Evening,” he greeted, as though it wasn’t much closer to one A.M.

            “Evening,” Evie replied. In the side mirror, there was movement back by the two trucks that’d stopped. Their matching insignias looked corporate in nature –maybe religious? It was a cross of sorts, but anything was possible with marketing these days.

            She looked back to the man at her window, and Evie felt that cold stab of something in her guts at the look he was giving her. She wasn’t sure if she’d call it terrified or awed, but it was enough that she kept her hand on the window’s handle. A little closer, the moon highlighted cheekbones sharp above a scruff of beard, and a mouth frozen mid-smile, as though he too had been stabbed with something cold in his guts. She wondered if the sudoku book could work as a weapon in a sticky situation. She wondered why she hadn’t thought to find another way of communication, should something have happened on the trip.

            “I’m sorry, my truck broke down, and I was going to wait for the gas station to open so that I could borrow their phone and call a local mechanic,” she explained, and her gaze fixed to the pendant hanging on his chest bearing the same insignia as the trucks did. Maybe a little less corporate, a little more religious. The thought did little to assuage the feeling of unease.

            The man looked to the gas station just ahead of them, then back to her with a coy smile. “That gas station has been shut down for about a month or so.”

            “Oh. Right, then.” She tried to keep a polite smile on her face, although it felt more like a baring of teeth. “Do you know of a local mechanic that could fix my truck up? I know it’s late, but I’m in a bit of a rush.”

            “The resemblance is uncanny,” the man murmured, obviously not to her.

            “Or,” she continued, gripping the window latch tightly, “I can just find someone myself, you know? You don’t have to worry about it. Thank you, though. I appreciate it.”

            He seemed to consider something, and just as Evie began to roll up her window with far more creaking and squeaking than she’d have liked, his face changed, and all hell broke loose.

            “Get the girl!” he demanded, and her passenger-side window was shattered as a bull of a man reached through and hauled her out of the opening, all elbows and knees as she screamed and struggled against the vice-like grip. Terror was a pinching feeling in her bones as she struggled, fought, and twisted against a hand that dug into the fat of her neck, digging in with just enough pressure to hurt. Glass from the window had caught on her cheek, tugged. Blood wept from the wound as she fought to no avail, lips parting to scream again only to find them covered by skin that reeked of hot pennies.

            This wasn’t happening. _This wasn’t happening_.

            Time felt both too fast and two slow as she was dragged around the back of the truck where several other men were waiting, guns drawn and held at lazy attention. Her blood froze over; her eyes rolled. In all of her worst nightmares, her worst fears, this had never quite reached the top. It was a fear, as all fears were, but one set to the side as she realized that the statistics made it unlikely. Large groups of men didn’t just kidnap women to rape and murder them. That was just in the movies.

            _That was just in the movies._

            Her screams became more desperate, muffled as they were by the man that’d dragged her from the truck. His grip at her neck tightened, and needles pricked over her body painfully.

            “Careful with her, now,” the first man urged, circling the back of the truck. The headlights from his vehicle accented his leather duster and the buttons on his vest, washed his face out and left him sinister and bleak. “We don’t want any accidents.”

            The man’s grip lessened, and Evie screamed insistently, thrashing about to no avail. She couldn’t get purchase on him, couldn’t get enough leverage to break away and _run_ , _run_ to the first person that’d help her, that’d save her from the hell she was sure she was about to enter. The other men surrounding them had faces hardened from manual labor, roughened from the elements. There was no succor there, no peace. They were all dressed in the same dirty woolen sweaters with the same insignia in red plastered across the front. A religious group? A terrorist group? A cult?

            _This isn’t happening_.

            “Bind and bag her. We’ll go to Joseph,” the man decided, and he headed towards the truck.

            A bag was dropped onto her head, and the moment that the hand was removed she began screaming in earnest, twisting and wrenching every which way to try and gain enough purchase to run. Despite the number of people there, watching, there was no sound save her noises of panic and the running of the engines behind her. Just when she’d twisted her wrist hard enough to get it free, something hit the back of her head, hard; nausea and vertigo took her to her knees as stars exploded in her vision, left her swaying and weeping as her hands were bound.

            She was dumped into the back of a van onto a narrow bench, and she gulped in air to keep from vomiting. The back of her head throbbed viciously.

            “Is…is someone there?” a voice called out, hesitant and distinctly male.

            “What’s happening?” Evie asked, trembling. Her voice came out weak, and she hated herself for it, hated the way her hands shook in the rope bound so tight it was rubbing at the skin on her wrists. “What’s…what’s happening?”

            “You got grabbed, too? Who are you?”

            “What’s _happening_?” Evie demanded, although it didn’t sound quite like a demand. It was too warbly, too telling. She was afraid. She was afraid, god dammit, and this was why her friends had begged her to just bite the bullet and buy a plane ticket. Too expensive, she’d said, and here she was.

            Here she fucking was.

            “John and his boys are snatching everybody up left and right for their fucking baptisms,” the other person snarled. They sounded angrier than Evie felt. Why didn’t they sound afraid? “They try and baptize me, I’ll rip hands off.”

            “W-what?”

            “That’s John Seed and his boys.”

            “Who?”

            “Shit, do you live under a rock or something?” they asked. “John Seed? The Seed family? That gutter shit out there with a duster like he’s some ass hole from the wild west shows?”

            “I’m…I’m not from around here,” Evie managed to reply. The van lurched to a start, and she let out a gasping sob and dug her heels into the floor to keep from tumbling over. They were taking her. They were taking her, and she wasn’t sure whether or not to risk taking the bag off, or if she was no good alive if she saw where they were going.

            “Well that makes one of us,” the person replied dryly. “What’s your name?”

            “…Evie. Who are you?”

            “Name’s Tim. Nice to meet you, given the situation.”

            Evie couldn’t quite return the sentiment, given the situation. Her breath was hot in the bag, and her heart hadn’t stopped hammering in her chest since she’d first heard the window shatter, the moment when she realized that nothing was as it seemed.

            “Are…are they a cult?” Evie whispered.

            “Yeah…fuckin’ peggies,” Tim replied.

            “Peggies?”

            “Project at Eden’s Gate. Peggy. Started out real innocent enough, what with the end-of-the-world shit and the ‘read your bible’ lectures. Now it’s all shot to hell and they’re acting like it’s really the end times.” Tim was apparently skeptical of the end of the world. Given what’d just happened to her, Evie wasn’t so unsure. “They’re likely off to take us to where he baptizes people, but they drug that water, you hear? We gotta fuckin’ run ‘afore they get us in that water, otherwise we’re as good as fucked.”

            “W-water?” The shaking grew worse. Her toes were going numb.

            “Yeah, the water,” Tim agreed grimly. “Listen, I’m thinking we rush them when that door opens, yeah? Get these bags off and give them a good scare.”

            “They have guns.”

            “Yeah, I’ll tell you here and now I’d rather go out from a gunshot than what they have in store for us, ma’am. One of my cousins went and got grabbed over where Faith runs her little drug factories, now he’s a damn ‘angel’ wandering around with that shit so far up his ass he can’t do much but grunt and groan. I’d rather die than get baptized.”

            His words weren’t doing much to bolster what little confidence Evie could normally scrounge up. It’d always been a joke over in Portland that small towns like this bred some colorful people, but this was by far the worst she could have ever dreamed up to come across in her entire life. They hit a bump in the road, and she yelped.

            At the feeling of hands near her neck, she jerked back and smacked her head against the van wall. Pain ricocheted across her skull, left her dizzy as the bag was removed. She swallowed down a gagging feeling in her throat, and at the sight of a grizzly and weather-worn man before her, hands also bound, she exhaled shakily.

            “Hey, just getting the bag off…s’alright, yeah?” Tim tossed the bag onto the ground at their feet, his hands still bound and his left eye swollen shut. His right eye was a sharp, indignant brown that was fixed on her pointedly.

            The van was something much like a delivery van, if a delivery van had been renovated to hold prisoners instead. Two long, narrow benches accommodated the space by the walls, the windows completely painted over in an opaque white. There was literally nothing else, save a few discarded flowers near their feet. They were beautiful, in their own way, petals wrinkled with mild aging and lack of water. Evie pressed her foot down onto one and swallowed thickly.

            “Thank you.”

            “So look, I figure they open that door and we just go for it.” He was still on about that, wasn’t he? Evie looked to the back door whose windows had not only been painted over but _barred_ , as though someone would have been desperate enough to break through it to run.

            Given what’d just happened, Evie couldn’t say she blamed whoever had caused the windows to be barred.

            “Then they shoot us?” she asked.

            “Maybe. Duck low, run in zig-zag’s, and make for the woods. You get to the woods, you haul ass, yeah? I don’t think Jacob’s sent his judges down for John to use, so we’re in luck there. No dogs hunting us, just men.”

            Evie wasn’t quite sure what he meant by that, dogs versus men, but she wasn’t comforted with his advice. If anything, when the van began to slow and roll to a stop, her hands started shaking harder, and she buried her face in them to stifle another gulping sob.

            They stayed still for seconds that bled into minutes. Tim stood in the center of the van, stooped from his height, and waited. When the back of the van opened, he didn’t let out a shout so much as a battle cry, charging towards the opening and leaping out with all the grace of a God damn gazelle.

            He made it ten feet before they shot him down.

            Guns were fixed to her, and Evie held up her bound hands and huddled farther into her seat, tremors working over her. Fear made her mouth fat and useless, and when someone stepped up into the van, she ducked her head, cursing the now-dead Tim for taking the bag off. This was how she died. This was how she died, and at least now she wouldn’t have to pay a lawyer just to stand there while she signed her marriage away.

            Hopefully someone thought to feed the dog when she never returned.

            “Are you very afraid?” the man asked. It was John Seed, according to Tim. The duster was definitely circa the ‘Wild West’ era, although the tattoo that’d been scratched out was far more modern. There was that insignia again. The cross within a circle, only it looked far too dated to be a cross, far too dangerous to represent hope as crosses were supposed to.

            She looked up at his face, beard trimmed and eyes calculating, and she gave a short nod.

            “Fear is healthy. It reminds us that we have something to lose.” He took her by the arm and guided her to her feet, no roughness to his grip the way the other man had been. He’d ripped her from her window like it was nothing. She felt the dried blood on her cheek like a brand.

            “You’re going to have a lot to fear, I think,” John Seed continued, hopping out of the back of the van. “Just remind yourself each time you feel it that it’s a good thing. And that so long as you do what you’re told, it will remain a simple fear rather than a horrible reality. Yes?”

            She stared at him, offering a hand to help her down, then to the men crowded out in a wide fan around them, waiting. Just in the distance, Tim’s body lay still. Blood pooled under him, greedy and reaching. He’d have rather died than face what happened next. _The baptism_.

            She nodded and hopped down, allowing him to steady her although everything in her blood screamed to run, run, _run_.

            John Seed led her around the van with a firm grip on her forearm, his free hand resting casually near the pistol at his hip. A silent warning, but a powerful one.

            They rounded the front of the van, and John Seed surprisingly stopped long enough for her to stare in horror at what she was seeing.

            Not a baptism, no, _no;_ it was a fucking compound.

            “No,” she whispered, and John waited an appropriate three seconds before he tugged her along, ignoring her having to stumble to catch herself as she was forced to follow.

            “Joseph is going to want to see you,” John said, hauling her underneath the wrought-iron arbor whose filigree and vines curled in reckless abandon. “So we’re going to see him right now.”

            “Wh-who…is Joseph?” she managed. Her voice was much weaker than it’d been when they first spoke. Her throat ached from screaming.

            “Joseph is The Father,” John replied.

            Just along the path they walked towards the apparent ‘Father’ burn barrels rested in even spaces, fire licking their insides as they were fed with something sweetly putrid, casting a smoky haze into the sky. She couldn’t see the stars anymore. No, instead Evie took in neat, organized huts with perfect spaces between, plots where vegetables and herbs grew underneath the watchful care of people dressed much the same as her captors. From a respectable distance, they watched with hooded gazes, faces glazed with something Evie couldn’t place. Some had even drawn the symbol of the cross along their foreheads, slick with sweat and grime. A cult. Peggies.

            She stumbled, and John hauled her along. Someone standing near a burn barrel attempted to touch her, and she skittered away from them, closer to John.

            They reached a simple white church, something every small town in every textbook had. Rather than enter it, though, they skirted the side where another small house lay, the lights on and the front door open.

            Just at the door, John paused and looked to her with that same odd, probing expression from before. A thin lip quirked, and he seemed to come to some sort of conclusion because he guided her into the house before he stood just in front of her, hiding her from view.

            It was a modest house, probably something the resident preacher would live in while tending their flock. There was a solid wooden table, solid wooden chairs, and a solid wooden bookcase that housed bibles, binders, and books yellowed with age and bent from use. Huddled at John’s back, his grip taut on her arm, Evie wondered if _now_ was the best time to run, or if someone lurked just outside to end her. There had been a river nearby; she could easily swim it if she tried hard enough. If she was desperate enough. What had Tim said? They drugged the water? She could try, though. It was said one could overcome anything with enough adrenaline in their system.

            With enough fear in their system.

            “John,” someone –The Father? –greeted warmly. “What brings you here so late in the evening?”

            “I found someone I thought you’d like to see,” John replied. There was something knowing to it that made Evie nervous, so much so that she tested the strength of John’s grip, tugging away from him with just enough pressure that he hauled her close, her cheek coming to hit against his shoulder blades.

            “Is it the deputy?” Joseph asked –dare Evie call it hope?

            “Far better, Joseph,” John said, and with a savage jerk he hauled Evie around him and held her shoulders tightly, fingers digging in as a silent warning.

            Evie stood trembling, and at the sight of the man before her, the shaking didn’t –couldn’t –abate.

            He was not too much older than her; early forties rather than early-thirties? He wasn’t informally dressed, although there was something informal about the vest and unbuttoned shirt –a family wardrobe choice, then. It wasn’t so much his stance as he stood and regarded her, but the expression in his eyes that made her blood run cold, made her breath stop in her throat where it was.

            He didn’t look maliciously overjoyed. No, no, in truth Evie would have called it utmost disbelief and hope.

            “…H-how?” Joseph asked. He was not looking to John, but to Evie, and when he took a step to her she took a step back, bumping into John who pushed her gently forward.

            “She was in her truck. A 1988 Mitsubishi,” John said, and that meant something to Joseph although it meant nothing to Evie.

            “Unharmed?” Joseph asked. He paused just a breath away from her, too close and smelling of hot skin in the summertime as well as a chemical-sweet stench.

            “Unharmed ‘till she was pulled through the window. Cut her cheek.” John’s voice turned, darkened into something Evie couldn’t name. “Do you want to be alone, Joseph?”

            Joseph regarded her, and she thought of Tim laying dead in the dirt, how no one seemed at all concerned about him being there, how he was happy dying there than being brought here. Maybe she should have died with him. Maybe she should have ran. Maybe death _would_ have been better. “Yes…I have a lot that I’d like to talk about.”

            “Yes, Joseph.” John headed back out of the small house, and when Evie turned to look at him, she wasn’t quite sure what she was looking for. Direction? Hope?

            He met her gaze as he crested the doorway, and the lopsided, thin smile returned. Then he was gone, and the door was shut, leaving her trapped with The Father –whatever the fuck that meant.

            She looked back to Joseph Seed, clasping her hands tightly together in their binds. It chafed, rubbed. Her skin felt raw and troubled, something that ached but could find no succor. Looking into the face of the man before her, despite the kindness and gentle disbelief, she could see no mercy. No kindness. No hope for her.

            “You’re here,” he said, hushed.

            Evie didn’t speak.

            He took her by the binds on her wrists and led her to the table where she sat down. Joseph circled the table, and when he returned with a knife, she tensed, teeth worrying over her bottom lip. His grip was gentle, but the glint of the blade was bright, and she flinched as he stooped over her, encasing her on all sides.

            “You’ve endured pain to get here,” he continued, as though her fear wasn’t palpable in the air and on the tongue. The sharp knife bit through the rope with ease, and he picked up the material as it gave way and hit the table with a wet _thump_. The inner bands were coated in blood, slick with it. In the dim lamplight, it looked brown rather than red.

            The skin at her wrists was shredded, hideous. Her hands were pale, and when he returned with a wet rag, she had no choice but to allow him to clean the wounds, gentle despite his position of control –perhaps, it was _because_ he knew himself to be in control? Likely the door was locked; likely there were guards just outside. Likely John Seed was waiting to see what happened next.

            “Pain gives the world an emotional context,” he said lightly, cleaning her wounds. “Worldly suffering is transcendent, though. God sees our pain and rewards our struggle.”

            “What are you going to do to me?” Evie managed when she could get enough spit in her mouth to wet it. Her throat was dry, the roof of her mouth cotton. “I…I don’t have money. I don’t have _anything_.”

            “God only asks for obedience,” Joseph said. At a hiss of pain, the rag stilled on her wrist. “He never asks for more than what we are capable of giving.”

            “I don’t care what God wants, I care what _you_ want,” Evie replied, and it was both the wrong and the right thing to say.

            Joseph Seed looked up at her, eyes blue even in the muted light, and he smiled. It was not the cold, terrible thing of a sadist, nor the wicked sneer of a man plagued by lust. It was honest, genuine, and it made nails claw down Evie’s spine as her warning bells continued to ring, ring, ring, with no hope that they’d stop ringing anytime soon.

            “All I ever wanted, Lilith, was for you to return to me. And with God’s blessing, all of that and more has come true. I’d promised you a home, and today I can honestly give that to you.”

            Evie shook her head, the words not quite sticking, not quite making contact. “I…I don’t understand, what…”

            “By God’s grace,” Joseph whispered, leaning in to kiss her temple, “welcome home.”


	2. 1994 Astro Van

Chapter 2:

            Evie woke in a twin bed in a shack.

            It wasn’t the shack or the twin bed that had her backed into a corner, chest heaving, but rather the lack of knowledge as to _how_ she’d gotten there that made her breath come out more like wheezing. Last she’d remembered, Joseph Seed –the _Father_ or whatever –had been calling her Lilith, welcoming her ‘home’, then –

            Nothing. A shimmery, dizzying wall.

            Her wrists had been bandaged, to better stave off infection from the ropes cutting through her skin. As she managed to gulp in another breath, her back spasmed, and she pressed it into the wall behind her, feeling every jerk and tug the kidnapper had resorted to in order to rip her from the truck. She wondered what shapes the bruises had taken.

            Had Joseph drugged her? Had he used the water on her, like Tim said?

            Was any of this even real?

            It was more of a small house than a shack at second glance, when the shock faded to mere confusion –and fear. Always, she figured, there’d be some semblance of fear until she was out of there. Simple wooden walls whose only décor were small picture frames that held images of that same cross, the glass removed. Had it been removed so that no one could use shards of it as weapons? Had someone else had such a thought, therefore the next occupant was sadly without chance?

            There was a small alcove with a toilet and a curtain, although the curtain had been stapled –a hasty addition, she supposed. There was a wardrobe with nothing hanging inside of it, and closer inspection revealed that it’d been attached to the wall. No curtain rods to use as weapons. No bookshelves to push over on someone. It was clearly a rather nice prison cell.

            It was only when her breathing returned completely to normal that Evie tested the door. To her surprise, it opened on squeaking hinges, letting in bright, unfiltered sunlight that blinded at first.

            Just in the doorway, a guard stood.

            “Good morning, sister,” the guard said in hushed, reverent tones. “The Father was wondering if you’d join us for breakfast.”

            Evie’s first instinct was to slam the door shut, but she held back. Although no longer bound, she was most certainly under surveillance. She noted the rifle slung over his shoulder, something she wouldn’t have been able to identify if it’d been pressed to her head. Portland, while surrounded by many rural towns, wasn’t exactly a haven for guns.

            “Is it mandatory?” she asked –weaker than she’d wanted. She cleared her throat and tried again. “Or…that is, is it demanded or requested?”

            “Breakfast isn’t mandatory,” the guard replied, expression puzzled. It was common knowledge, she supposed, that breakfast wasn’t mandatory. “You missed morning prayer, but if you’d like to explore the grounds, I’ll accompany you.”

            And that is how Evie Kincaid found herself touring the grounds of a religious cult, accompanied by a man that smelled as though he’d slept in a sty and had likely never come in contact with actual deodorant.

            It was much like the Saturday market in Portland, now that she thought about it.

            It was a silent affair, the two of them walking. Evie needed to feel open air around her as much as she needed a way to find a weakness in their perimeter, a place where she could get away when no one was close enough to shoot. The Father called her Lilith, spoken as though they knew one another. He’d used a familiar touch with her, like he’d had to be gentle with her before, like he was used to telling her all about God and glory and pain.

            Whoever this Lilith was, Evie hoped for her to return soon so that this mishap could be over. That is, if they didn’t kill her when they realized she was a fraud.

            The compound buildings were aged, having seen many snowed-in winters and rainy springs. Likely the river nearby would rise up each spring from the runoff; she wondered if the banks became too narrow, if it was deep enough she could dive in and keep going until she was gone. She’d seen enough crime shows to know that the longer she was a prisoner, the less likely it’d be that she’d be able to escape.

            Gardens were bursting with ripe fruits and vegetables, peppers rich and spicing the air alongside tomatoes the size of two of her fists. Other cultists worked with their heads down and their eyes averted as she passed. She noted how each one had a gun, either slung over their shoulder or resting just at their side.

            The revelation did little to comfort her.

            After the gardens were more cabins in the same peeling white paint, cedarwood sharp and pungent in the bright sunlight. It was going to be a hot day; already so early in the morning, and Evie could feel the sweat building at the nape of her neck.

            She reached the fence whose top was wrapped in spikes, and she turned around and headed back.

            To the naked eye, she could see no weakness. There were even a few patrols on the tops of the houses, pacing and staring out to the horizon. These were not a peaceful people, it seemed, but people waiting on the edge of something –the end of days, according to Tim. Evie side-eyed the gun clasped in her guard’s hands, and she wondered if they were as easy to use as the movies and shows depicted. Surely once the safety was off, a gun was a gun, right?

            There were far too many gun accidents in the United States alone for a reason, though. She’d likely do more harm to herself than good should she try and take it.

            “Do you like the music, sister?” the guard asked, and Evie looked to where he gestured. In her absence of direction, they’d made it back around the church where a small firepit made the perfect circle for singing folk songs. One woman strummed a guitar, eyes closed to the music, while her friends sang along with hands clapping to the beat.

            “ _Oh, John! Bold and brave! He’s findin’ us a family, he’s teachin’ us the faith,_ ”

            “ _Oh, John! Keep us safe! He’s gonna march us right through Eden’s Gate…”_

Evie stopped and stared, the words creeping with the slow, steady assurance of something poisonous. Their harmonies were beautiful, their voices strong, and when one of the girls noticed her, she stood and rushed over, hands outstretched.

            “Come, join us! The song is easy to learn! It’s so fun!”

            “ _—if you can’t believe your ears. The blessing just takes minutes, but it lasts a thousand years! In holy water there can be no tears.”_

_“Oh, John! Bold and Brave! He’s findin’ us a family, he’s teachin’ us the faith,”_

_“Oh, John! Keep us safe! He’s gonna march us right through Eden’s gate –”_

_“Oh, Lord!”_

_“He’s gonna march us right through Eden’s gate~”_

As the guitarist finished strumming, the small group laughed and applauded, giving one another the sort of side-armed hugs that spoke of solidarity and familiarity. The woman standing just before her tilted her head, her hands outstretched and beckoning.

            Evie thought she was going to throw up.

            “…N-no, no…no, thank you,” she managed, and she skirted around the woman, unable to quite meet her eyes as she kept walking. She was more than aware of their confusion, their whispers, but if Evie was right than that song was about John Seed, the one that’d kidnapped her only hours before and allowed his people to murder a man for trying to run from him.

            She was just heading back to the small house she’d been dumped into when the man in question stepped right in front of her, barring her escape.

            “Good morning,” John Seed greeted coolly.

            Evie couldn’t keep his gaze. The song still ricocheted in her head, the words damning in how ardently they were sung. She thought of Tim’s still body and wondered if they’d bothered to bury it, or if they’d tossed it in a ditch somewhere for buzzards.

            “Leave us,” he said to the guard, and the guard backed away without hesitation, giving them wide berth.

            Evie studied the guard’s back, then her shoes, scuffed and muddied from being dragged about the night before. There was a snag in her jeans, likely from the truck window. She wondered what happened to it. It’d been a beat up thing she’d picked up somewhere in Idaho for three hundred bucks, but it was sturdy and reliable despite being unable to get past eighty-miles-per-hour.

            “Do you remember me?” John asked.

            “That depends,” she said to her shoe, staring at it. She dug the toe of it into the dirt and twisted, hard. “Are you referring to this Lilith that Joseph Seed claims me to be, or are you referring to last night when you ripped me out of my car window and took me captive?”

            Staring at her shoe as opposed to him gave her the sort of strength she wouldn’t have otherwise had. The wind stirred hair at the nape of her neck, turned the dust that she’d kicked up.

            John laughed lightly, but it didn’t sound sincere. It was the sort of tone-practice from someone that knew how to lie, and how to lie well. “You don’t believe yourself to be Lilith?”

            “Both of us know that I’m not Lilith,” she retorted sharply.

            “Both?”

            She let out a huff of air and looked up to him sharply. “You said, ‘the resemblance is uncanny.’ You didn’t say ‘you’re Lilith!’ or ‘I can’t believe it.’ You said ‘resemblance’ meaning similar, but not the same. You know.”

            John Seed gave her a sidelong stare, something mischievous and entirely unsettling. His blue eyes glinted like ice chips. She wondered if he’d baptized anyone yet, or if that was strictly an evening affair. She eyed the pistol at his hip, a not-so gentle reminder that she wasn’t in control of her circumstances in any way, shape, or form. Maybe if she ran her mouth too much, he’d just shoot her and call it a day.

            “Do you know who I am?” he asked instead.

            “You’re John Seed.”

            “Do you know what I do here?”

            She hesitated, a breath sucked in too hard that warbled against her ribs. “…You baptize people. You drug the water and baptize them.”

            “I baptize them,” John agreed. “I’m called John the Baptist, but the people of the congregation also call me Inquisitor John. Do you know why?”

            Evie gulped in another breath and held it.

            “It’s because to truly atone, to truly be cleansed and made clean and forgiven for your sins, you must confess. And who better to confess to than the one that baptized you, that first began your cleansing?”

            Evie glanced to his gun again, and John dipped his head down just low enough to catch her eye, that uncomfortably intense expression pinned to her.

            “See, you keep looking at my gun,” John noted, tilting his head. “Do you think that confession is easy? To truly pull from each and every person their worst sins, their grievous crimes and cruelties, it must be stripped from the body, pulled from their very soul.”

            The breeze that blew sent goosebumps down her arms, and she exhaled slowly.

            “Do you think that one is able to achieve such a genuine, _true_ confession through a simple gun?” Convinced that she was listening, he straightened once more and folded his arms over his chest. “No; no, this gun is not your enemy, Evie Kincaid. This gun is mercy, the sort of mercy that as both the Baptist and the Inquisitor, I can’t personally show without denying someone their true process of cleansing and atonement. That is the only way that they can make it through Eden’s Gate.”

            Silence. Evie looked up at him, her name ringing through her ears in slow, lazy spirals.

            She opened her mouth, but nothing came out. She gulped in a breath, her heartbeat pounding in arteries at her wrists; she held the air in, then exhaled sharply.

            “You see, we each of us possess a sin, something all-encompassing that we wield clumsily because we don’t know better. Some harbor more than others, and some only struggle with one. I can see your sins, though. Your wrongdoings. I… carve it into your skin, brand you with your wickedness, and through your pain and remembrance, through your agony, only then are you able to atone for it. It is cut from you, that you never commit such sins again.” John tugged his shirt down only just, exposing the word ‘wrath’ along his skin, an angry scarring over it with raised and puffy pink flesh. He’d dug deep to cut it out, she saw. His wrath. “You…I wonder what yours shall be. What sin consumes your soul.”

            “…What are you asking me to do?” she managed, only it wasn’t what she wanted to really say. _You’re a monster_ , followed by, _I just want to go home_ , would have been better choices. Maybe something along the lines of _You’re going to go to jail for this once they realize what you’re doing._

“Joseph Seed believes you are his deceased wife, returned to him from God for his obedience and faith. Her name was Lilith Seed.”

            “I’m not, though, you…you know I’m not, you just said my fucking _name_ , I…” Better. She caught herself, though, from going too far; his shoulders tensed as she protested.

            “God never asks more from us than what we are able to give,” John echoed Joseph from the night before. The memory was fuzzy, left her with an odd sense of vertigo. That shimmering wall filtered in again. “If you do as you’re told, when the time comes for him to ask me to baptize you, to _cleanse_ you…that cleansing may have no need of being so…distasteful.”

            “And…and your mercy?” she prompted, nodding towards his pistol.

            He rested a hand on it lightly. “Nothing you have to worry about.”

            Evie felt like crying, but the idea of weakness in front of someone like John Seed didn’t settle right. Instead, she gulped down the sob that was growing like a fat, ugly knot in her throat, and she looked around the compound, people walking about as though they _wanted_ to be there, as though this was _right_.

            Not exactly, though. Just to the side, being passed down from an Astro van much like the one she had been held captive in, a few people were trembling and shaking much the same way as she had, their shoulders turned and their faces set in furious indignation. She thought of Tim, how he’d died. No one ran like he did, risking death over what else they had in store. Maybe these people knew that they truly had no chance in running –maybe they were waiting for their chance, like Evie was.

            “Will you extend mercy to these people if they don’t want for themselves what you want for them?” she asked.

            John followed where her eyes were set, and he rolled his shoulders back, expression inscrutable. “In the end, we will save them all. With or without their consent.”

            “My friends will look for me when I don’t get a hold of them,” she said, her voice far away. Tinny. A little shakier than she wanted, in truth. “My husband. My family.”

            “You’re married?” John seemed to find that enormously funny. She looked back to him in time to see him swallowing down a grin, and she didn’t find it important to mention that yes, yes she was married but not really because could someone say they were married when they didn’t even live in the same state anymore? When there was no love anymore?

            “They’ll call the cops. I’m not from around here, they’ll…know something’s wrong when I don’t make it back.”

            “If they manage to find us, we will bring them into the fold as well and make them part of our family, too,” John assured her, only it wasn’t very assuring. Were there no cops around? No one to find them? No one to run to?

            _That gas station has been shut down for a month._

Just where the fuck was she?

She looked back to the people being led into a small, smudged-looking house much like the one she’d woken up inside of. Some of the people –prisoners –were crying, others resolute. One draped in the arms of another was bleeding freely from a head wound, unconscious and unresponsive. Evie found herself gulping down another sob trying to build.

            “Are you still very afraid?” John wondered, and she felt his eyes like a brand, dug deep and burning on her skin.

            “Yes.”

            “You won’t have much to fear so long as you behave.” He said behave, but it sounded much more like ‘obey’. “The Father wants to see you again. He has been praying since you were taken to your quarters.”

            At his gesture, she fell in alongside him and followed at a slow pace, as though they had all the time in the world. Maybe, in his world, they did. What had Tim said? The Peggies were preparing for the end of the world?

            “Why do you call him The Father?” she asked. “Isn’t he your brother?”

            “He is The Father of this family, the one that speaks with God,” John replied. “He hears the Voice and guides us so that when the end comes, we are prepared for building anew.”

            They were headed towards the church that loomed just ahead, the spire of it blocking the sun and giving some reprieve from the heat that baked down on them. The light illuminating it made it somehow feel like more than what it was, something grandiose and important rather than sinister and foreboding.

            “…And he thinks I’m his dead wife,” she murmured. “How…how did she die?”

            John reached the door and gave her that same searching, intent stare from the night before, his lip quirked just-so. On anyone else, it would have almost been called mischievous. “A car wreck…while driving a white 1988 Mitsubishi Mighty Max. Just like yours.”

            And with that, he opened the door and all but pushed her inside, closing it behind them and leaving them in the muted light.

            It was an old church, something reminiscent of the Southern Baptist one she’d attended a few times growing up. Her mother wanted them to be good Christian folks, but her father had found his spirituality in eight other women and the preacher’s wife, so church didn’t seem like such a good idea after that.

The pews were empty, dust motes dancing along them in the muted light. It was stuffy, almost, with the heat just outside and the old, aged wood inside holding the smells of a long dead forest. What few lightbulbs there were had a yellow tinge to them, illuminating windows at the far end of the chapel, obscured mostly by a large American flag. The same cross had been embroidered with care overtop the stars, and the edges were tattered from use.

            Just at the front of the church, Joseph Seed –The Father –knelt with his tilted back towards the heavens, arms outstretched in supplication.

            John nudged her forward, and she tripped over the first few steps, catching herself and scuffing her shoes along the wooden floor that took every sound and amplified it. The noise seemed to rouse Joseph the way that the door opening hadn’t. His arms lowered; his head bowed, and he turned it just-so in order to glance back out of the corner of his eye.

            “Go,” John urged softly, and with another nudge he sent her down the rows of many empty and desolate pews in order to stand just behind Joseph, her skin crawling and her heart beginning to wrench about and constrict in on itself.

            “Kneel with me,” Joseph urged, and Evie didn’t kneel so much as she dropped down and stared at the steps in front of her, hands clasped so tight the knuckles were white.

            They were quiet for a few minutes, and it gave Evie enough time to try and still her hammering heart, control her breathing so that it didn’t lisp and catch in her throat. His hands were clasped the same as hers, tight and trembling like this was as much a terrifying thing for him as it was for her.

            But of course; how did one even begin to speak to their long dead wife?

            “I have been praying,” Joseph began, and there was an aged wisdom about him, something that radiated off of him like heat from fever. “I have been praying for guidance at the blessing and the curse that has been brought before me.”

            “…Curse?” Evie managed to ask. She was conscious of John behind them, far enough away for privacy but close enough he’d surely hear her. She thought of his mercy, how he didn’t wield it because he’d rather hurt someone instead.

            “That you’ve been returned to me is a sign from God that all is not lost…that as I create and lay down these foundations for his children to be safe, he shows me his love in all forms. My suffering was not in vain, and having never expected to ever lay eyes on you again…reconciling myself, going forward with no fear for He is with me, he chooses to give me this, your presence beside me once more.

            “And yet…your loss of memory, your lack of _knowing_ me troubles me. I do not claim to understand all of his design, so I have spent the better part of this day praying for his guidance, that he speaks and the Voice gives clarity.”

            The Voice? Evie resisted the urge to glance back at John, needing some direction. It was too jarring, too soon and too fast –did he truly think God would bring someone back from the dead for him, a gift for all of his struggles? She peeked up at the flag just before them, then to the small pulpit that they knelt before. There was that cross again, imposing and judging.

            If she managed to get out of this alive, she hoped to never see it again.

            “Will you not tell me how you came to be here?” he rasped, something jagged in his voice.

            “…My truck broke down.”

            Silence. She peeked back at John, seated just at the front pew with arms crossed and one leg laid over the other. He gestured pointedly, and she faced the front once more.

            “I…I was…going to Missoula, and my truck broke down,” she tried again.

            “What do you remember before going to Missoula?”

            “Traveling. I’ve been traveling.” She considered mentioning her divorce, but she wasn’t sure how _that_ was going to go over. His wife. The man thought that she was his dead wife. “…Why don’t I have any memory of last night?” she asked.

            “You became hysterical, and I worried you would hurt yourself. I gave you a mild sedative so that you could rest.” It was said so calmly, bereft of guilt or anger. Her jaw worked furiously as she tried to chew and swallow the indignation coupled with horror. Just what had he done to her?

            What the fuck had he given her?

            “How are your wrists?” he asked.

            She looked to the bandages, a bright medical tape against the muted and dour colors of the wooden floor, dusty and needing a good sweep. The heat prickled the back of her neck, left the skin there sweaty under her hair. “I’m fine.”

            It wasn’t good enough, it seemed. Joseph stood and took her by the hand, helping her up so that he could inspect the wounds. It was difficult to think of him as the one allowing –condoning –the people that she’d witnessed being herded into a building that would hold them hostage when he took such gentle care with peeling back the tape and gauze in order to see what the rope had done the night before. Although there was some relief that he did not hurt her, it was superficial at best. She wouldn’t truly be safe until she was far, far away from there.

            The wounds had wept blood that’d soaked into the gauze then dried on her skin. The stagnant air in the church tickled oddly against the exposed skin, and he lightly brushed a thumb across a particularly vicious gash where the rope had been utterly merciless.

            “You were never baptized,” he said, and he led her up the last few steps to the windows, the light illuminating her wounds. Just underneath, the cabinets housing small cups for sacrament and platters for bread, also held a first aid kit that he produced in order to clean her wrists once more. “Our only real, honest fight, I believe. That, and what to name our child.”

            “I don’t believe in God,” she said, and he stilled with the cotton swab of alcohol poised just above her skin, his breath taut in the uncomfortable silence that followed.

            “God is who saved me when you died,” he replied after a moment, and he pressed the cotton swab down, the alcohol stinging and spitting against her skin. She hissed and tried to pull back from him, but his grip on her tightened, his elbow turning just-so to give him leverage as he began cleaning at her wounds agitatedly. The alcohol burned, stung with enough fury to make her eyes wet. “When he took you from me, it was God that gave me the guidance, the strength to continue on.”

            “Please stop,” Evie said.

            He ignored her, though. The Father wasn’t so much cleaning as he was scrubbing at her skin with the alcohol, the pressure of it chafing on the open wounds that began to bleed once more, begging reprieve. Evie trembled, her bottom lip drawn between her teeth as she bit down, hard. She’d be damned if she cried in front of him again.

            “Having endured what you have, how can you stand here in this place of love and peace and tell me that you don’t believe?” he asked, and he wrenched her wrists up above her head, held aloft in the brilliant colors of the stained glass, blood pinking as it mixed with the rubbing alcohol and trailed down her forearms. “Where we have forged ourselves from the fires of this land where people turn on one another like wolves, where we have sweated under a sun that burns our ozone from inattention, where we have allowed our societies to praise weakness and sin while casting aside purity and kindness, you would stand before me and say that you don’t believe? _You_?”

            She looked to his eyes, burning with a righteous fury, and she wondered if John was going to step in, if his mercy was going to be used after all. Her breaths were lisping in her throat again, short and each one worse off for the panic of the one before. Her blood dripped onto the floor of the church between them.

            “Is that my test from God, that I must show you the path as I tried so diligently before to provide? That if I can show you, you of all of his children, then any other may come before our God and _know_?” The Father wondered, and in that moment it was much easier to see him as just that –The Father, in all his aweful wonder and power. She thought of the people cowering as they were herded into the warehouse, and maybe John wasn’t the one she had to fear the most.

            He stared into her eyes, and there was a dizzying moment where she wasn’t quite sure if he was seeing _her_ , or something far away, a photograph grainy and distorted from time and exposure to the elements. One heartbeat, then another; he released her arms, and she lowered them, arms wrapped tight against her chest.

            The Father let out a warbling breath and leaned down to press his forehead to hers, smelling of sweat, the hot summer air, and an oddly sweet scent that brought the image of that shimmering wall to mind again. It made her stomach roil, but Evie managed to stand very, very still.

            “You have _always_ been my blessing and my curse,” he whispered to her. She stared at his boots, the curve of his hip as he leaned in to her. “I have both loved you and feared you for it. My greatest test and what I pray may be my greatest triumph, should God will it.”

            It was at that moment, as Evie opened her mouth to reply, that several things happened at once:

            A siren began to wail in the distance.

            A dozen or so people outside began shouting.

            Gunfire erupted in the distance.

            And above it all, an explosion cracked and let out a horrendous, ear-shattering _whoomph_ that sent Evie to her knees, hands clapped to her head to protect her ear drums.

            “The Deputy!” John shouted. Through her watering eyes, Evie watched him leap from his place on the pew and race towards the double doors of the church, coattails flapping.

            “…and Hell followed with him,” The Father murmured, and with far less enthusiasm, he drew a pistol from its holster at the small of his back and waited for Hell to arrive.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for the positive feedback! Hope you're having a good day. If you haven't read it yet, the Far Cry 5 novel 'Absolution' was incredibly inspiring to me as far as going a little more in depth with the characters as a whole.


	3. 1999 Ford Pinto

Chapter 3:

            The air smelled of blood, burnt flesh, and bliss.

            “Burning bodies,” Rook murmured, eyes scanning the small dip in the land where a burn pit had been established. A few peggies stood just at the lip of the pit, watching the flames devour the flesh of their neighbors with expressions ranging from disinterest to bloodlust. It was the range of emotion –that anyone could have any other emotion than disgust –that clung to Rook as the most disgusting. The most unsettling.

            “Shit’s gonna stink in this hot air,” Jess replied, disgusted. “Guy’s on his third rotation.”

            “Sharky, you copy? On fourth, you go.”

            “Copy, deputy. Let’s light a fuckin’ fire up their ass.”

            Silence, save the birds in the trees and the breeze that hushed the tall grass and scrub brush around them. An apt cover. She recalled from basic training the drills in grass much like this, thick and hissing sweet secrets. She heard the shushing of footsteps in the grass, something light. Likely a squirrel or rabbit.

            “Your guy didn’t say how John and Joseph are both in the same place?” Jess asked. She held still save lips that moved with quick, curt twists. Her control while on the hunt was unparallel to any other, an asset Rook relied on heavily.

            “No, just that they were. Just that it’d been more than two hours.”

            It was enough of a tip that Rook had been on the move and on the 'hunt', as she and Jess called it, scouting the area and making a plan. Normally, Rook would be a bit more careful, but time was of the essence. The siblings, although close, did not often spent too much time together, to better spread their assets in case the deputy came knocking.

            Which is why she’d allowed a god damn spider to make its home along her boot laces after she’d belly-crawled to the perfect vantage point and posted up. Fucking spiders. Only John Seed being in the same place as Joseph could make her endure something so utterly horrifying.

            “Probably baptizing some poor shmucks that didn’t get out in time,” Jess continued, eyes keen on her mark. “Maybe Pete is one of them, and they didn’t get him yet.”

            Pete was one of Rook’s best informants. They’d come back to the side of reason, although only a few were aware of it. Rook had sent him back in order to glean details from within.

            Two days and no word, though…

            “Maybe he is, maybe not. Don’t count your chickens.”

            Quiet again, which was to say not-so quiet when one was among nature. A hawk somewhere in the distance circled, circled. It screamed, dove. Rook tracked it through the air, then landed on the guard making their fourth rotation.

            “Now.”

            “Copy,” Sharky said, and he set off the bomb.

            It hadn’t necessarily been set where Rook had wanted it, but they couldn’t quite get close enough to the church where it would have been ideal. She watched the mushroom of air, heat, fire, and wood arc end and spill out, then moved from her cover and shot once, twice.

            One man dropped, arrow through the eye. One woman dropped grasping at her neck.

            Another peggy gave a shout, dropped; Jess was already firing her second arrow as Rook watched a fourth fall, and then they moved, the trail rough and coarse against their leather shoes, all the better for how they gripped the earth and made steps silent. Rook gave the signal, and they split, Jess taking to her second position while Rook took advantage of the panic happening on the _other_ side of the fence and went in through the opening they’d made earlier in the wire.

            Combat was like screenshots of simple action and reaction to Rook. Adrenaline made them choppy, smooth in how they transitioned but quick in attempting to look back and remember. _Inhale_. The guard that hadn’t yet moved, shouting into his walkie, dropped with a knife through his neck. _Exhale_. The knife was gone, Rook on to the next corner where she turned and stabbed the guard posted just beside a door.

            _Crk- whumph_.

            Another explosion shook the earth beneath her. _Inhale_. She stumbled, caught herself, and used the momentum of her fall to swing around another corner where she shot the woman running towards her. _Exhale_. She threw a grenade back behind her where she could hear peggies clamoring after her. _Inhale_. Bullets spit and bit at the wood at her back.

            _Bam. Bam, bam, bam._

She ran when the shotgun stopped, not looking back to where she knew Kris would come in from behind, a guy she’d stumbled across at the truck stop and God _damn_ had she been impressed with his resumé. She took out the guard whose face was painted and whose chest was exposed to show the scarred space beneath. He’d let his sin be ripped from him. He’d arisen cleansed.

            Joseph Seed was close. She could almost taste it.

            The church doors loomed, the sound of gunfire just where the second explosion had gone off. Jess kept her back covered as Kris cleaned up shop, and as she crested the steps she felt her breath ballooning in her ribs. She was going to kill him.

            _She was going to fucking kill him_.

            It was only instinct that saved her, in truth. Years of practice, of knowing to always expect the unexpected, to prepare for anything and everything that could happen because the moment you don’t is when you truly fail. _Inhale_. The movement in her peripheral was _not_ planned. _Exhale_. She fell, twisting her hip so that she rolled behind the small wooden barrier. _Inhale_. The wood cracked and splintered as she took fire, her shoulder burning as though a hot iron had been pressed to it. _Exhale_.

            “Good morning, Deputy,” John Seed called out, taunting. “Have you come to be saved?”

-

            Evie Kincaid had once been part of a car jacking where she and her friend were held at gunpoint when a man decided to jump into their car while Evie’s mother grocery shopped a mere two hundred feet away.

            Incidentally, Evie’s panic had been her saving grace. She’d begun crying, gulping for breath, and when it sounded like an asthma attack, the car jacker had panicked, letting up his guard just enough that Nicole had been more than able to let out an enraged scream as she wrapped her belt around the assailant’s neck and choked him long enough so that they could jump out of the car and run to safety.

            Later, Nicole made it sound as though Evie had done most of the rescuing. Evie had always known better, though, just who had saved their asses that day. At a tender age of fourteen, when her mother asked if she wanted to come into the store or not, after that encounter she always said yes.

            The second bomb going off sent Evie running for the back door she’d spied when they first entered the church. Even at the sound of “Lilith!” she did not turn, her shoulder slamming into the door as she fumbled with the knob and took off running, sunlight spilling across her skin, illuminating the streams of blood from wounds fussed with too soon.

            Hell had arisen.

            Great gouts of black smoke filtered the air, the sounds of gunfire ricocheting off of the faded white walls she’d first encountered. There was shouting, screaming, and she took off as fast as she could towards the water, towards safety and surely Tim was lying when he said they drugged the water?

            Gunfire scattered along the ground just to the side of her, and she screamed, running towards the closest house and cover.

            The door was locked. More gunfire surrounded her, her breathing ragged and short as she jumped and took off around the house, pressing her back to it as she gagged on air and stared at the fence just five feet from her, razor sharp wire overtop to keep her from climbing.

            There was more gunfire, and she dropped to the ground and cowered. With a curse and a shout, a grubby woman in camo threw herself behind the house and quickly exchanged an empty clip for a full one.

            When she saw Evie, Evie threw her hands up and held still. Surely her heart would give out from how hard it pressed to rip from her chest? Surely she’d choke on her own tongue from breathing so hard?

            “I’m not one of them,” Evie blurted, staring. The woman held no markings of that awful cross, her eyes a sharp pine green and her dark skin lightly freckled.

            The gun leveled at her looked far more lethal than John’s pistol. There was a moment where the woman let out a slow exhale, and she inched closer, pressing a finger to her lips. Evie went taut as she brushed past her, and she looked over just in time to see the woman remove a knife the size of her forearm from her belt in order to slit the throat of the man that’d just rounded the corner.

            The dead body, the woman, and Evie stayed pressed against the wall of the house, silent. Evie trembled all over, something she sorely wished to stop, and when the gun was turned to her again, she kept her hands up.

            “Who the hell are you?” the woman asked. She had a distinct southern accent, not quite like the country folk Evie had met during her drive. It had a rolling sort of sound to the consonants, lazy yet curt all at once.

            “My name is Evie Kincaid, and these people are holding me prisoner. Please, you have to help me get out of here.”

            The woman looked her over, from her traveling clothes to the newly opened wounds that still lazily dragged down her arms. Her brow furrowed, suspicion set in her mouth.

            “Why?”

            “Why? Because they’re psychotic, because –”

            “No,” the woman said impatiently. “Why are they holding you prisoner here?”

            “I…am trying to understand myself, actually.”

            The sound of shouting was getting closer, taking the woman’s attention away. She looked to the sound, and Evie looked beseechingly at the woman, lowering her hands to grab at the woman’s shoulder.

            “Please, you can’t leave me here, I –”

            “Unless you can shoot a gun, you aren’t going to be much use, no offense.”

            “I was abducted by John Seed because Joseph Seed thinks I’m his dead wife, and they’re going to make me be cleansed because he sees it as a test of god, _please_ , you can’t leave me here,” she said, the words rushed and garbled but surely the woman heard her? Surely she’d understand?

            She did. The woman leaned back in from around the corner where she’d been keeping watch, and she stared at Evie, first confused, then stunned. She seemed to see Evie for the first time, from her mussed hair to her bleeding wrists, and within another breath she seemed at a loss, like out of all of the things in the world that woman had expected, this would have never quite made the list. After, there was something world-wearying in her eyes as she nodded, lips pressed down tight with the color drained away.

            “…Come on,” she said, curt, and she turned, slipping along the back of the houses. Away from the fighting. Away from the noise.

            Evie made sure to keep close as she followed. She stepped over the body of the peggie as she did.

            They made their way out through a hole in the fence that at first glance merely looked reinforced rather than broken. Up the hill they crested, then into a set of trees whose thick branches blocked the sun, pines dotting between deciduous trees whose leaves were a sun-soaked green.

            The gunfire and the sound of breaking glass followed them as they fled downhill and towards a small river. The woman made no noise, merely gestured where she proceeded to go into the river and wade over slick rock, her steps careful and her breath held. The water, despite the heat of summer, was shockingly cold, and her birkinstocks didn’t do as well as the woman’s leather boots in holding on. She slipped, slid, then crouched low and let the water soak greedily into her pants as she trudged along.

            There was no speaking between them. The woman would gesture, and Evie complied, wondering where her allies were because surely she hadn’t attacked that compound alone? No one else joined them as they finally made their way up a mossy riverbank and climbed over rocks, the woman taking the time to scatter leaves and sticks over the damp impressions and mudslick Evie had left behind as evidence.

            They took off at a sprint into the woods, Evie’s shoes far more to task with that than attempting to traverse weather-smoothed rocks.

            She wasn’t sure how far they ran; only that the stitch in her rib was growing, and the woman didn’t seem entirely keen on stopping. They were reaching another stretch of water, and she moved down the hill to make her way under the bridge where a hot breeze stirred up the groaning and aches of the metal above. When they reached a small boat, Evie climbed and helped her paddle across, the smooth wood carving through the water with patterned ripples behind them.

            Just on the other side, a woman waited on the sandbar with a truck. White cross included.

            “N-no, no, this isn’t –you’re not –”

            The woman’s eyes cut from Evie to the truck. Her intense expression of focus softened, but only just. “We stole a truck. Had to blend in.”

            Despite her reservations, Evie helped them drag the boat into the bushes under the bridge.

            “Why’d you pull us?” the other woman demanded as Evie bent over to catch her breath. “Who the fuck is that?”

            “I’ll explain later. She’s with me.”

            “You’ll explain later –she could be a _fucking p_ eggie, if Jacob got hold of her –”

            “We ain’t got time for this, Jess. Cover us. I’ll drive.”

            The woman circled the truck and gestured for Evie to follow. Underneath the hardened stare of a woman who wore scars on her face like trophies, Evie circled the truck and got in.

            When her rescuer started the truck up, her counterpart climbed in the back and they tore off up the bank and onto the road.

            “Place’ll be crawling with peggies,” the woman muttered to herself.

            “…Where are we going?” Evie asked.

            “Rendezvous point. Then on to Fall’s End where we’ll recap with Pastor Jerome.”

            “…And…who…who exactly are you? Who are you with? Who are… _they_ with?” Evie ventured. She was catching her breath again. She was gulping down the urge to cry.

            “…You’re not from around here, are you?”

            “Is it that obvious?”

            The woman smiled, but only just. It didn’t quite reach her eyes. “Name’s Deputy Ridley. I worked for the Hope County Police Department up until Joseph Seed decided to start a war within the county because he supposes the world is ending. Now, we’re just hanging on until we can bring him to justice and get the Federal government involved.”

            Evie’s mouth dried up. “How…h-how does no one know about this?”

            “They took down the towers. No signals, blockades set up, most business that came up here had dried up before it happened. We’re not near a major highway, so no one passes through. Makes it easy for a town to get missed.”

            “But…but those guns?”

            “Stockpiled.” At the sign of another truck in the distance, the woman in the back slapped the side, and Deputy Ridley took a sharp right, plunging them onto a narrow trail over rocks and dirt smoothed from constant use. “Look, we’ll get you to safety. After that, though, I can’t promise much.”

            The trail roughened, and they bounced over the worst of it, Evie hanging on to the sidebar to keep from being thrown into Ridley. They took another corner, and she found herself pressed against the door before they came to a halt, the woman taking her gun out once more as she threw herself out of the truck and waited to see who followed.

            The person that came barreling up the hill after them didn’t alarm them, although at the sight of him Evie wondered why the hell not. Strapped to his back, a large flamethrower stood overtop him, and he held the nozzle of it towards them as he waved.

            “Lost them two miles up,” the man said, and he nodded towards Evie. “Who the hell’s that?”

            “She’s with Rook,” the other woman said sarcastically. “Come on.”

            The man took it far better than the woman did. He gave a nod, an amiable smile towards Evie, then said, “Name’s Sharky.”

            “…Evie. Evie Kincaid.”

            “That’s Jess,” Ridley said, and took off down a trail towards the hills.

            Two miles of hiking took them to another car that they piled into, a rusted red 1999 Ford Pinto with only two doors. The drive was silent, save for the occasional sniff or grunt. Too late, Evie saw Deputy Ridley’s shoulder was wet with blood, the camouflage damp and dark.

            More of the church music played on the radio. The lyrics grated in Evie’s ears.

“ _He once was a peach picker, and he toiled in the sun…_

_He reaped the orchard on his own, until the day was done_

_His hands were hard and calloused, cause he didn't have a choice_

_He served so many non-believers, 'til he heard the voice_

_Now he's our shepherd, and we're his flock_

_Now he's our captain, and our ship's about to dock_

_And now he's our keeper, he'll keep us safe from wrath_

_Now he's our father, he's gonna lead us down that path…_ ”

            “This one’s gotten more upbeat,” Deputy Ridley commented lightly. “The last one was a choir rendition.”

            “Fuckin’ hate this shit,” Jess muttered.

            When they rolled into town, it was easy to see that it wasn’t another compound. Neat rows of wooden shops lined the main street, a garage to one side and a bar open beside it. There were buses whose sides had been scorched blockading the other side of town, and just beside it there sat another white church whose spires lifted to a bell that rang cheerfully.

            People crowded out into the streets as they rolled to a stop, and although they didn’t cheer, they circled round and began shouting and talking at once, insistent and bright.

            “Come on,” Ridley urged, and she nudged Evie through the crowd where she was placed on a bench outside of a shop and told to wait.

            Through the crowd, a man in the black and white cloth of a pastor walked through, and he clasped arms with the deputy and gave her a grim, fierce nod.

            “How’d we do?” he asked. Just behind them, breaking through the crowd, Jess gave Evie one last searching and suspicious look before she continued on, headed towards the church. Sharky led the rowdier of the crowd into the bar where the lights were turned on and music trickled through the windows. Evie felt somehow disconnected from it, not quite part of the things happening around her. She looked down to her wrists, and that was enough of a reminder.

            “Got Pete out, but he’s in bad shape. Had Grace run him to the Vet’s, but we’ll see.”

            “Another saved, then,” the man said, relieved. “Did you get John Seed? Did you get Joseph Seed, deputy?”

            Evie looked back in time to see regret harden the deputy’s face, made her spine stiffen as she spit on the ground. “No. Real close to John but didn’t get him. Close, but not enough.”

            “Close but not enough,” Evie murmured, and she nodded in agreement. She was close to Lilith Seed, but not enough.

            The pastor seemed equally aggrieved, although it showed more in how he turned to comfort her rather than how he drew away. He grabbed the woman’s good shoulder, squeezed, then held on.

            “The Lord works in mysterious ways,” he said, and the deputy nodded.

            “Well, I’ll let you puzzle that out for me, Pastor Jerome,” she said, and she nodded towards where Evie sat. “This here woman says that she was abducted by John Seed because she looks like Joseph’s dead wife, Lilith.”

            Pastor Jerome stared at Evie, and much like the deputy, he seemed at a total loss, shell-shocked and exhausted.

            “I’m from Portland, and I was just on my way to Missoula,” Evie explained, and it felt better than words could quite convey to finally be able to explain that. “My truck broke down, and when John Seed found me outside of town, he had me taken to Joseph.”

            She gulped down another sob, and the sun made it easy for her to blink the wetness away from her eyes. She wondered what the hell would happen when she never showed up to her divorce settlement. She wondered if her husband would even care, or if he’d simply move on and never bother her about it again.

            Pastor Jerome took her hands, and she gave a jump and looked to him, dismayed to see compassion where she’d expected to find disbelief. He looked to her wrists, then to her, and smiled warmly, all the knowing in his face that said he completely understood exactly what she was feeling.

            “You’re safe here,” he said, and he helped her to her feet. “Come on, let’s get your wounds looked at, shall we? Then we can see about a bed and a meal.”

            “I’m going to regroup with the others,” the deputy said, and she looked at Evie intently. “You can trust Pastor Jerome. He won’t toss you out for the wolves.”

            And Evie, despite her fear and her gulping gasps, completely believed them. She followed Pastor Jerome, and she wondered if she was maybe going to survive after all.

-

            “Are you fuckin’ kiddin’ me?” Jess demanded. She sat crouched on the couch, helping to clean Rook’s wound. “She could have been a peggie –still not convinced she ain’t.”

            “She was smart,” Rook recalled. “She saw me and knew I wasn’t one of them. She was running from the fight, not looking for someone. She was looking to escape.”

            “How long has she been locked up? Who knows what they have in her head?”

            “Wounds were fresh. Some bruising, but mostly bad rope burn. She was newly imprisoned.”

            Jess didn’t like being faced with logic when she was on a roll. Her worry often shifted into a projection of anger, although Rook knew it was because she cared. In her worry, she slopped rubbing alcohol all over Rook’s shoulder, made it burn like a cat scratch that couldn’t heal.

            “I saw a photo of Lilith Seed, once,” Rook shared after the stinging pain had faded to a dull, hot throb. “She looks like her. Real ‘salt-of-the-earth’ sort. Almost a hippy type.”

            “When did you see _that_?”

            “…When he saw me at Jacob’s camp,” Rook replied. Curt. It wasn’t a good road to tread along, remembering things. You had to keep moving to survive, otherwise things replayed in Rook’s mind for hours on end, over and over and over again. _Inhale. Exhale._ “Showed me a photo. Him and a pregnant woman, and that Evie out there looks just like her.”

            “Is that why you believed her?” Jess asked skeptically. Where it was just a flesh wound, she didn’t have to fuss over it too much. Still hurt, though. It’d make reconnaissance a little more difficult until it healed.

            “…She said please,” said Rook, quiet. “And it sounded real enough to me.”

            Jess bound the wound tight and offered some pain pills she’d snagged from a pharmacy that the peggies had ransacked. It would hardly dull the pain, but maybe some of it.

            “Fuck, dep, if he really thinks that’s her, he’s not going to let us get away with takin’ her. Joseph’s going to send everybody he’s got to get her back,” Jess said as they took turns passing a bottle of whiskey between them. It was a ritual, of sorts, their quiet contemplation. Her quiet was much like Rook’s quiet, which was to say that they both showed their worry in their aggression and had to vent it out somehow. Rook thought of John Seed being so close yet so far, and his close company of men had overwhelmed her before she could get the shot. Close, but not close enough. Her grip tightened on the whiskey bottle, and she took a heavy gulp of it. It burned just like her shoulder.

            “Yeah,” she said, and she stared at her boot where blood had smeared just along the top. It was high enough that the river hadn’t been able to wash it away. “Yeah, I know.”

-

            Deputy Ridley returned just as Evie was getting settled onto one of the mattresses in the church. Where the other church had felt stifling, unsettling, this one was warm despite the buzz of weapons and ammunition that passed through the back doors of it. People were busy. People were fighting.

            She’d changed into something other than camouflage, a little more comfortable. Her shoulder was bandaged, but it didn’t seem to bother her as she strode through the double doors and made her way to the back.

            “Deputy,” Pastor Jerome greeted, and she didn’t reply so much as set the radio quietly onto the table where a bible and a pistol rested.

            A little crackly but still understandable, Evie could hear John Seed:

            “ _…-ken from us just this morning, but brothers and sisters, fear not. For we are all children under The Father, and is it not our calling to bring sinners forth and cleanse them, save them from their wickedness and discontent?_

_“Lilith Seed, you have been Marked. Your path of sin has taken you from the light of The Father, cast you from where you could take his hand. Is it not our duty, brothers and sisters, to help her find the way? To help her become unburdened? Lilith Seed is a Sinner, and we will be the hand that cleans her of her sin._

_“And as for you…you don’t have to worry for a thing, Lilith. We will come for you. We will take you. And we will bring you to the Light.”_

Silence fell across the church, only this one was so finite that Evie swore she could hear a pin drop. Her heartbeat felt too far away from her, and it wasn’t until the deputy was shaking her shoulder that she realized she’d stood at some point as though to back away.

            “We’re going to help you,” Deputy Ridly was saying, but it was a faraway kind of thing, like a shout down a desolate hall. Evie looked from her to Pastor Jerome that’d gone on to explain just who they were and what these people stood for. Resistance fighters. Those that refused to bow to the dictatorship of someone so delusional they thought themselves ‘Chosen’.

            And John Seed was far more likely to extend his Mercy towards her, now that she’d pissed him off.

            She gulped down a breath, but it was like she was underwater, and no matter how hard she kicked, she couldn’t resurface to breathe.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've always loved my deputy. Have a good day, y'all.


	4. 2001 Ford Fiesta

Chapter 4:

            In the wee, pale hours of the morning, Deputy Ridley woke Evie Kincaid from a restless sleep.

            “Let’s go,” she urged, and her silence was enough to make Evie take careful steps as they crept from the church. Her back ached from the lumpy mattress, but it was better than before. It was better than being drugged.

            They didn’t get into a car and drive until two miles out of town. The air was cold against her cheeks, she zipped the hoodie gifted to her from the church. She remembered sitting there for hours, listening to the arguments. What were they to do with her, knowing that Joseph wanted her so badly? Was the town under direct fire again? Was Joseph reaching out to his other siblings to rouse them into the search?

            That he had other siblings had been doubly upsetting. She’d choked down food out of a need to stay alive rather than a genuine urge to eat. It’d sat useless, heavy in her stomach until she’d been able to fall into a restless sleep.

            When they got in the car, the deputy drove without the lights on, expression fixed to the road. Evie wasn’t sure what to make of the woman, her hair a thick and unruly auburn and her eyes sharp like the green of fresh cut bark. She wasn’t exactly what one would say was pretty, but there was something striking about her. Like lightning, one found it difficult to look away.

            She was quiet, though. Apart from chiming in either to either support an idea or strike one down, she leaned casually against a wall, arms folded and pensive expression fixed to the floor. On occasion, she’d glance to her counterparts, then over to Evie, her stare disconcerting.

            “Where are we going?” Evie asked when the silence was too much.

            “I’m taking you where you’ll be safe,” she said. “Got some friends up north that’ll stash you away where the Seeds won’t get their hands on you.”

            “There are more that will help?”

            The deputy nodded.

            “Do you trust them?” Evie pressed.

            Her eyes remained fixed to the road, the lack of lights from the truck making it difficult to see. “I trust them more than I trust myself.”

            Silence descended in the truck once more. Deputy Ridley reached over and turned the radio on, allowing the cheerful, grating music from the church to filter in the cabin.

 _“…time has come for judgement, but we ain't done nothin' wrong_  
_Join us all, we all can sing along_  
  
_“Oh John! Bold and brave!_  
 _He's findin' us a family, he's teachin' us the faith_  
 _Oh John! Keep us safe!_  
 _He's gonna march us right through Eden's Gate (Oh Lord!)_  
 _He's gonna march us right through Eden's Gate…”_

“Do we have to listen to this?” Evie asked over the music.

            The deputy quirked a brow, then looked to the music and turned it down a notch. “It’s the only station we can listen to. I’m not much of a talker.”

            “Did they take over the entire radio signal?” Evie asked.

            “No,” the deputy replied. She seemed to wrestle with something, then finally relented. “Did you meet Jacob Seed when you were there?”

            “…No. I was there for a day.”

            “Jacob’s territory is where we’re headed. He trains their militia in the north.”

            “Is _that_ where we’re headed?”

            “No. But if he gets you, he gets in your head. Makes you something you’re not. Makes you turn on people, hurt people. Does it with a song.”

            Evie could see where this was going. She cursed her cotton mouth as she tried to swallow. “…What song?”

            “That’s the problem, isn’t it? Dunno it. But I figure, they won’t make it a song they play all the time, otherwise you’d have people losing their mind all over their compounds. So until I know the song to avoid, all I got is this shit here.”

            The deputy caught her horrified stare, and she smiled grimly. “Same way as I figure, they won’t think I’m headed back since Jacob knows I know what he’s doing. They won’t see us slipping in, I head out. Right now, they won’t think I’ll keep you with me, They’ll think I split us up to make it more difficult. By the time they think any different, that’s when we’ll be split up.”

            It was logical, methodical. There was no flicker of emotion on her face that made it seem as though she recognized just how _wrong_ it was to talk like this, that things like this didn’t happen in the United States. That she could explain something so horrific in such a matter-of-fact way, was unsettling, like a sore you kept tonguing over in your mouth.

            “How long have you been dealing with this?” Evie wondered, guts twisting.

            The deputy thought about it, taking a turn and heading up a steep incline. “A few months. Maybe almost five now.”

            A few months. Evie thought to a few months back, when everything in her own life had seemingly spiraled. She’d felt on the edge of a precipice, back then, with her husband and her newfound sense of loss. She’d tried to make the leap, but how could she? She had her job, but she hated it. She had her friends, but in a divorce one lost more than just their spouse. She could already see lines being drawn, and once again she had to endure that feeling everything slipping away.

            “Have they always been this…?” Evie gestured, then frowned. “Before, I mean.”

            “I wouldn’t know too much about it.” The deputy rubbed her thumb and finger together, and it reminded Evie of her mother that often did that, pantomiming a time when she’d smoked. “I was in the service. Retired, found a place hiring and training in the police force, got assigned to Hope County. Worked here two weeks, then shit hit the fan.”

            “You’d only lived here a few weeks? Then you see the Seed’s, and… this?”

            She nodded, jaw working as though she could chew her words to the right shape. “Met them once on my first week. Second time, a US Marshall shows up and thinks his badge was more important to them than God.”

            “What happened?”

            That took a long time for her to say. The music gave an eerily cheerful cry for them to always keep their rifle by their side.

            “We arrested Joseph Seed under the suspicion of kidnapping with intent to harm, Arson, blackmail, and extortion. Upon escorting him from the premises, a follower threw themselves into the blades of the helicopter and sent it crashing back down where a US Marshall and three police officers were then taken hostage, locations uncertain.”

            It was the sort of tone-practice from someone that’d taken the time to memorize a script. It was distant from them, held at arm’s length. Evie wondered at the agony, having to go through something like that alone, unsure of just how to un-fuck the situation. Maybe the silence was to keep her from screaming.

            “Then, for the first time since, we received a tip that John and Joseph Seed were together for a period of time of more than an hour or so,” she continued. “We secured the perimeter as best as we could, and we launched an attack on the main compound in order to eradicate two of the four leaders of the cult.”

            She cast a wry glance Evie’s way as she concluded, “And it was there that rather than ending John and Joseph Seed once and for all, we pulled back in order to get you to safety.”

            The truck whined through a gear, then bounced over a particularly rough spot in the road. The deputy was driving by the moon, trusting memory to lead where light could not.

            _We will bring you to the light._

            “I’m sorry,” Evie said, but that wasn’t quite what she wanted to say. _Thank you_ , followed by, _I don’t want this anymore than you do._

But it was her facial expression that caught Evie off guard, even as the music chanted about castles and sinners. It was somehow hopeful, distinctly mindful of Evie as she leaned against the driver’s door and propped her chin in her palm.

            “Don’t be. You didn’t start this.”

            “Neither did you, though,” Evie pointed out.

            “No…but rest assured, I’ll finish it.”

-

            It was dawn when the deputy pulled over and tucked the truck into the trees and underbrush. She worked with a quick efficiency that spoke of having to do this rather often, and rather discreetly. Evie worked as best as she could, but she had gotten maybe a couple of hours of sleep. It weighed on her, left her movements sluggish. When they walked into the trees and began aggressively hiking, she struggled to keep up, the light not quite breaking through the thick leaves to guide their path. The deputy walked with careful attention, whereas Evie found herself stumbling across several roots and branches.

            At the top of a small hill, the deputy produced an energy drink for each of them, as well as a meager breakfast of trail mix and granola bars. She didn’t speak to fill the silence, nor did she ask about Evie’s life before this. It would have been an unsettling sort of quiet, if she didn’t understand perfectly why they were being so careful.

            John Seed was coming for them. He was going to drag Evie to the light.

            They hiked even as the sun continued to climb, even as sweat ran down Evie’s back and left her sticky and likely smelling of gym socks. Occasionally, the deputy would point out a river or a landmark and tell Evie what it was, but other than that, they were quiet.

            They took a break somewhere around noon, just underneath leaves that gave a small reprieve from the baking sun. Evie used the sleeves of her jacket to wipe the sweat from her brow, then tied it tight around her waist.

            “How…how far out are we?” Evie managed as they passed a jug of water back and forth. While she wore no pack, the deputy had been smart enough to grab a few things to keep them going. If the weight of it troubled her, it didn’t show.

            She looked out towards the hills that, as Evie looked back, was surprised to see had become steeper and steeper as they’d hiked. Just how far had they come? Out and among the brush and dense undergrowth, the thick trees and branches widespread enough to stop the worst of the heat had disguised their climb and ascent. She couldn’t quite see where they’d started, let alone where they’d stopped the truck. Or maybe she was just bad at looking? Hard to tell.

            “Not too far. Making good headway, but I’m taking the roundabout for obvious reasons.” She considered the sun above them. “We’ll camp tonight.”

            “We’re _camping_ in the forest with those…people inside of it?” Evie asked incredulously.

            The deputy looked at her oddly and nodded. “Got our people in it, too. They may think they’re militia, but peggies can’t cover every inch of ground. Gotta travel and camp and piss just like the rest of us do.”

            And with that, they were off once more, a pace that was rough enough that words weren’t possible, even if desired.

            It wasn’t until the beginning of sunset that they stopped, and Evie helped the deputy set up a small, four-person tent that in truth would hold two comfortably. She remembered those from sad family camping trips, how they would boast just how many people could fit into one. Her father would almost always break one of the poles in his anger at setting it up. Almost always. Someone would end up sleeping in the truck bed because there was never enough room.

            The deputy didn’t break or snap any poles, but she didn’t speak much, either. It was daunting, her silence. As Evie helped her find wood to burn, a small stack in her arms compared to her counterpart’s, she wondered at it. There was a scar on the side of the deputy’s neck that looked fresh, as well as a few bruises across the back of her hands. Scabs on the knuckles from punching and punching and punching.

            Just how long had she been fighting for her life? Just how long had she been alone?

            She started the fire up but kept it low until it was nothing but hot embers. Two aluminum foil packets were produced and tucked into the coals as the sun crested the nearby mountain top and dipped into the trees, bathing the green in rich reds and ocher. Evie watched her work, her own body far too tired to complain when the deputy gave the quick, short command to “sit and rest.”

            When she was passed a tinfoil meal on a blue plate, Evie ate without question. Rice had been mixed with peppers, chicken, beans, and potatoes, seasoned with a spice she couldn’t quite place. It was rich, filling, and she finished hers before the deputy did, stomach full. The deputy wordlessly offered water, and she drank it.

            “Did you make that?” she asked.

            “Dutch did,” the deputy replied. After a moment, she added, “You wouldn’t know him. Lives in a bunker down southeast of here.”

            “Is he…”

            The deputy kept her head down as she shoveled the food into her mouth. “Saved me when our truck went over the bridge. Peggies got the Marshall, Dutch got me.”

            “Your truck went over a bridge?!”

            The deputy glanced up and smiled wryly. Using her fork as a prop, she carried it along the air until she made an explosive noise with her mouth and sent the fork careening onto her plate with a melancholy clank. “Right over.”

            Evie had nothing much to say about that.

            “If you’re trying to imagine this in America, don’t,” she said to Evie after she’d wiped her plate clean with a chunk of bread. She wasn’t bothered by Evie’s unease, it seemed, her unwillingness or inability to see. She set the plate down and poured them both a cup of coffee, the grounds making the rapidly cooling air smell sharp. “I served in the military. Two tours in Iraq, and this isn’t really something that’s anywhere. Lots of people saw shit out there, but nothing like this.” She gestured with the coffee cup. “This is black, by the way. Didn’t pack room for sugar or cream.”

            Her calm in the face of danger suddenly made so much more sense. A soldier.

            “Thank you for your service,” Evie said lamely. She accepted a cup and took a sip of the scalding drink; definitely black coffee. Definitely coarse grounds.

            And despite the ragged pace of the day, the early hours and the unrelenting sun, the deputy grinned over her cup of coffee, something that completely transformed her weary eyes and the scowl dug deep into her brow.

            “Anytime.”

            The deputy took watch after she’d banked the embers and left them in relative darkness. Judges lurked about, she said, and they’d have to take turns keeping watch. Evie hadn’t yet seen these monstrous wolves, but considering how vague and uneasy everyone seemed about them, she could safely say she wanted nothing to do with them.

            Despite the coffee and the fear lurking inside her veins and pulsing in her arteries, sleep did find Evie, huddled as she was in a thermal sleeping bag that trapped heat remarkably well. Sleep was clouded, darkened from panic, but there all the same, waves of images that lapped over one another in a dizzying array. The snapping of twigs didn’t wake her, and neither did the deputy’s occasional muffled cough as the hours crept on and she kept diligent watch.

            No, no; what woke her was the singing.

            It was soft, at first. It crept in her dreams where she walked down a path, everything about her disjointed and shimmering. She was walking to something. She was walking, and someone was waiting ever-so-patiently.

            She opened her eyes and stared up at the domed ceiling of the tent. Her cheeks were cold in comparison to the rest of her body. She dove down into the sleeping bag and gave a rattling breath. Evie wondered just what’d happened to her sudoku puzzle.

            When the music only grew rather than fade, she pulled herself out of the sleeping bag and donned the jacket she’d been gifted. Maybe it was the quiet of the morning, but it only struck her now as odd that she’d so easily gotten rid of her clothing in the wake of her rescue. Pastor Jerome had given her clean clothes, and she’d taken them. She’d not mentioned her stolen suitcase, her personal belongings. She’d simply stripped out of her things and let them be taken away to who in the hell knew where.

            The deputy was at the edge of their small perimeter, looking out into the distance. Without any lights closeby, the stars above had exploded into a myriad of white, the milky way arched overhead and brilliant in its satin curves and iridescence. Ridley didn’t speak when Evie drew near. She merely continued staring out in the night, towards the sound of music. Her mouth moved along silently.

            “…What is that?” Evie asked. It was faint; in her dreams, it’d sounded much louder.

            “A pilgrimage,” the deputy replied. “They’re trekking down to follow the Henbane River to Faith.”

            “Faith?”

            “A sister to the Seed’s. One of them, but not really one of them.”

            Quiet once more. Across the vast distance, the many voices had no distinction, merely ripples of sound that coalesced together to reach up to the heavens. There was something ethereal to it, even as it raised the flesh on her arms and made the hair on the back of her neck stand up.

            “What are they singing?” Evie asked.

            “Oh, the bliss…oh, the bliss will set you free. Oh, the bliss will make you see,” Deputy Ridley chanted, and her face hardened. Whereas before, the planes of it were smoothed, as much part of the silence and stillness of the night as anything else, there was now a haunted look as she stared out towards whoever it was that made such a march so late in the night. “It will make you see,” she sang softly.

            “What does it make you see?”

            “Shit.”

            “…Oh.”

            The deputy cast her a wry glance. “It’s a hallucinogenic. Oh, it’ll make you see alright, but nothing that’s real. Nothing that’s tangible and honest. All they know is how to trick and beguile.”

            It sounded as though she were trying to convince herself as much as Evie. Evie wondered if she’d had to do the same in Iraq, or if it was harder to see these people as villains when they seemed so ardent and faithful to their God. Was that what Joseph had given her when she’d become hysterical? Was that the shimmering wall that came to her whenever she thought of that night?

            “I’m going to get some rest if you’re ready for watch,” the deputy said, interrupting her train of thought. “Have you ever shot a gun?”

            Evie sheepishly shook her head. “A bee-bee gun.”

            The deputy headed back towards the tent, shouldering out of her coat and unholstering her gun. “Well, if you see something, wake me up. I won’t come up shooting at you, promise.”

            It took far, far too long for Evie to realize that the deputy had just told a joke. As she stared out into the inky blackness of the forest, then up at the stars that lit the night sky, she smiled despite herself.

            The eerie singing carried well into the night, promising hope among the Bliss. Sometimes, she imagined that she could hear the deputy just inside of the tent, humming along too.

-

            They broke camp early with a meal of cream of wheat, sausage, and cheese. The singing had stopped hours before, but it clung to Evie’s ears and left her muddled and uneasy.

            If the singing bothered the deputy, it didn’t show. She ate quickly, washed her face, then broke camp, her only disappointment being that with a second body around, their camp was incredibly noticeable. Nothing to be done, though. She’d buried their fire, swept up as much of the footprints as she could, then took off with Evie close behind. She made no mention of the voices.

            They took a break around noon, the sun beating down once more. Hot days gave way to colder nights and even hotter days after in Hope County. Why couldn’t Evie have waited until the early Fall to go and sign divorce papers? She knew she stunk to high heaven, but the deputy didn’t seem to care or mind. Maybe, being in the position they were in, everyone just naturally stunk. There didn’t seem to be an abundance of showers in the mountains.

            “A couple more miles, and hopefully the car I tucked away is still there. People making a break to get out sometimes get desperate and take things.” The Deputy dug through the pack and pulled out an apple, a small pocketknife close behind to cut it.

            “If it’s not there?” Evie asked.

            The deputy cut a slice, considering it before she took a bite, thumb sliding idly along the flat of the blade. “Then we’ve got to keep hiking, or we find a car somewhere else.”

            Evie set down the jug of water and nodded. The echo of John’s words on the radio before haunted the piercing cries of the birds overhead.

            Thankfully, after a couple more miles, the car was found amid branches, leaves, sticks, and a muted tarp that rippled with the colors of the wild wood around them. It was a beat-up, rusted little Ford Fiesta with the words _Sinner_ spray painted on the side, dried drips from where they’d gotten too close with the paint can. The deputy kicked at the word, considered it.

            “They hadn’t even taken the bodies out after killing them,” she said conversationally. “I buried them, but it had a full tank. I don’t think they mind.”

            The deputy packed the tarp up small and tight, and she strapped it to the pack before they climbed in and headed up an access road with packed dirt and deep ruts. The forest was changing around them, drying out. The trees became a little sparser, the bushes scrubby and grey. As they slowed for a deer crossing, his antlers were thick with velvet and far larger than the deer down below.

            “Keep your head on a swivel. You see anything, let me know.”

            The deputy fiddled with the dials on the radio as they drove, let the haunting choir music trickle in. She drummed fingers on the wheel, scanned the area around them. Evie opened her mouth to say something, then shut it. After another few minutes of crackling singing about castles, she tried again.

            “How’d you know her name is Lilith?”

            The deputy took her time answering. She rolled her thumb and her pointer finger, as though itching for a cigarette, her scowl off to the bend in the road that she took with care. She licked dry lips, then seemed to find what she was looking for.

            “I saw a picture, once. Joseph Seed showed me.”

            “Do I…do I honestly look like her?”

            Ridley smiled wryly. “Yeah. Close enough.”

            “Close enough,” Evie echoed. Had Deputy Ridley gotten The Father and John the Baptist? Close. Close, but not enough.

            “Close enough a guy like that, always snorting Bliss and praying up delusions wouldn’t see the difference. It was just a photo, but damn.”

            “And you think he’d…he’d honestly abandon whatever it is he’s doing down there just to get me back?”

            “You told Pastor Jerome that they kept you in a room with the door unlocked, right?” At Evie’s nod, the deputy nodded. “Maybe he thinks you just lost your mind. Maybe he thinks if he goes through the process and the ‘path’ you’ll remember and be a true follower. But let’s just say, my own welcoming down there wasn’t so great. I was knocked out, and I woke up tied to a chair while John Seed prepared to torture me.”

            “They drugged me the night that I was taken there. He said I became hysterical, and he sedated me.”

            “I’d become hysterical too if someone was claiming I was their dead wife,” the deputy agreed. “If you kept that up, maybe they’d skip John and have Faith give you new memories. Whatever memories she wanted.”

            Evie choked on her tongue. “She…what?”

            “She runs their drug operation, and –”

            But Evie wouldn’t hear about the drug operation. As they took a corner, a deer ran out; the deputy let out a curse and used the e-brake that took them into a controlled spin, managing to miss the deer entirely.

            But not the truck that came careening into the driver’s side door and sent them over the ledge, crashing down into the ravine below.


	5. 2001 Ford Fiesta Pt. 2

Chapter 5:

            Evie came to with a start, her heartbeat pounding behind her eye.

            As her vision came into focus, all that she could think was _ow._ She was staring at part of a tree trunk, the back of a leg, and the forest floor; with every heartbeat that pressed harder into her eye, the pain seemed to worsen. She was jerking, bouncing, and after a particularly sharp bounce, she whined out a breath. There was a pause. She tensed, then found her world turning end over end as she was set onto her feet. Her knees gave out, though, and she slumped to the ground, the knots of a trunk digging into aches and pains that she was certain would never go away, not so long as she was in Hope County.

            “Wh –wha –”

            “Hey, you’re up,” the deputy said cheerfully, albeit softly.

            “Where are…what…”

            “Sh, sh” the deputy whispered, crouching down beside her. Despite the situation, she had a small smile gracing her mouth. “S’alright. How do you feel?”

            “Ow,” Evie managed, and she exhaled sharply. “How long was I out?”

            “Couple minutes. Hit your head as we went over the ledge, knocked you out. Got you out, saw four men up top with two headed down the bend to come around and flank us. No Judges, so we might get lucky.”

            “Lucky?” Evie wheezed, pressing a hand to her bruised chest.

            “Yeah, lucky. Stay with me, alright? We’re going to get out of this, but first we gotta lose them. I know you hurt, but right now we don’t have the luxury of feeling pain. We are strong, you understand? The Strong don’t feel pain. The Strong don’t feel fear. The Strong Survive, hear me?”

            There was something so earnest in her eyes as she spoke, like these words were both for Evie and herself. It stirred something inside, made Evie nod her head in agreement even though that fucking fear was dancing along her spine and tugging at her nerves. She must not have been very strong, to still feel Fear like she did.

            “Follow me,” the deputy whispered, and off they ran.

            The running was slower than it had been before. Adrenaline pushed her forward with every step, but her muscles were already screaming from the arduous hiking before and the crash that’d followed. Still, they ran across the bed of needles, the deputy’s pack still on their back like this was completely, utterly normal.

            “LILITH!” someone shouted in the distance. “WE’LL SAVE YOU FROM THE DEPUTY!”

            “WE’RE HERE TO CLEANSE YOU!”

            “Fuck,” Evie hissed, and she pumped her arms harder, stumbling, then catching herself as they made their way up a sharp incline, farther and farther from the road as the deputy struggled to make distance. They had to make distance. They had to get away.

            They skirted a large, dead tree that laid wedged between two boulders, and that is where the deputy dragged her to a stop, chest heaving from the effort. Sweat was slick on her forehead, made her thick hair dark at her temples.

            “Lay low,” the deputy urged, and she slung her pack to the side, withdrawing from it a large and deadly knife. “Should have brought my rifle.”

            “You don’t have a gun?” Evie asked incredulously.

            The deputy patted her holster. “Always got one, but they’re loud. Gonna make this quiet. Need to make it quiet."

            “DEPUTY, RELEASE THE MOTHER TO US!”

            The shouts were farther out, headed in the opposite direction. Evie accepted the water forced towards her mouth, although most of it sloshed down her shirt than in her mouth. She passed it back, eyes wide and terrified towards the treeline. The trunk and boulders provided excellent cover, but how long until they decided to hike up?

            Was John Seed with them?

            “Evie Kincaid, come out, come out,” John Seed called out, far closer than his men. Just down into the small glade, the sun glinted off of something metallic, lethal.

            Beside her, Deputy Ridley went very, very still.

            “I’m not here to hurt you, Evie. I just want to talk to you and clear up this misunderstanding,” John continued, unaware of them just up the hill.

            Evie looked at the deputy, eyes wide.

            “I’m not even after the deputy at this moment. I just want to make sure that you’re safe,” he said, and between the trunks of the trees, she could just barely make out him pacing lazily, eyes scanning the area around them.

            “He tracked us.” The deputy used a handheld scope to look through the area, frowning. “Came alone. No men with him.”

            “You think he’s honestly here to talk?” Evie wondered.

            The deputy gave her a look but didn’t quite dignify it with a response.

            “If you come out, we can have an honest conversation.”

            Silence once more. Evie looked to the deputy, and the deputy glared down into the glade.

            “I’ve got an idea,” the deputy said after a minute or so. “Let’s let him have an honest conversation.”

            “What?” Evie hissed.

            “Yeah, look. You go down slow, stay in the tree line. He thinks you’re alone, I circle ‘round, and I get him. You don’t engage in combat, he goes down quiet and we get away from the others.”

            Evie stared at the light hitting the sunglasses atop his head, the way his head swiveled in slow, sure angles. He was waiting for her. Maybe waiting for the deputy, too?

            “I don’t…know if I can fake that, though.”

            “Don’t sell yourself short. Remember: The Strong Survive.”

            There was the unsaid aspect of it, too: _If you don’t, we may not survive._

            Life was like that, Evie supposed, as she slid and crept shakily down the sharp incline, relying on larger rocks to catch her. She didn’t quite know this woman, Deputy Ridley, but in the face of her own demise, there she was headed straight towards a man that two days before had casually threatened to torture her. She didn’t feel particularly strong in that moment, nor did she feel brave. When her hands weren’t holding the base of sage brush to ease her descent, they were fumbling awkwardly, not quite sure where to go.

            She had to trust Deputy Ridley to save her, though. That was all that she could hang onto.

            John Seed was in the center of the glade as Evie reached it, hovering near the wide trunk of a Balsim Fir. He’d gotten rid of his duster in the hot summer air, although he still wore a button-up shirt and leather vest, the shirt cuffed clean-as-you-please at the elbows. It was his belt buckle that glinted, not his gun. That sat holstered still, his sunglasses pushed up into thick dark hair. There was something lethal about how he moved, somewhat shorter than his brother and lither in build. He prowled much like a predator, searching.

            When she came hesitantly into few, heart screeching in her veins, he said kindly, “Hello, Evie. Are you still very afraid?”

            “Yes,” she replied quietly. Then, louder, “Yes, I am.”

            He nodded understandably. “I’ve been thinking about your fear. I wondered to myself, after hearing you’d been taken, just when your fear began to first overwhelm you? How long have you been as you are, jumping at the drop of a hat?” He tried to take a step closer, and she took a step back. He paused, head tilted as though to catch her sharp intake of breath. “At a mere footstep?”

            “I’ve…always been afraid,” she said, and it wasn’t a lie. “Where’s the deputy? What’d you do with her?”

            “The deputy has to be saved, too, Evie.”

            “Did you t-take her?” she demanded, and it sounded just as terrified as it did accusatory. She wondered if the deputy could hear, if she approved. It sounded believable enough. “What are you going to do to her?”

            “Help her, just like everyone else. Save her, just like everyone else.”

            The fact that he was pretending with her was unsettling. She couldn’t be sure if he knew she was lying, or if he wanted her to think that she was alone and cornered. She couldn’t see the deputy moving about in the brush, but she hoped to hell that she was. For her lack of belief in God, she supposed that now would be a great time to pray to one.

            “I used to always be afraid, too,” John said, and she looked to his amiable smile, half-quirked like he had a secret. “I always feared what the day would bring, what horrible things would happen to me. It ate at me, made me weak. I dreaded mornings when I lay in bed, fearing at the days where the slightest slip-up meant punishments so severe the breath was taken from me.”

            “What did someone like you have to fear?” Evie asked.

            “My parents, mostly. I came to find that fear was a good thing, though. It makes you hyper-sensitive to everything around you, kept you sharp. Fear is healthy. Fear reminds us that we have something left to lose, even when everything feels as though it’s already lost. It makes you feel…very alive, that moment.. You never had to fear your parents though, did you?” Even at their distance, he saw something in her face. His expression softened. “Well, just one of them.”

            And it was in that revelation that Evie paused, caught herself before she could look to the trees once more. How did he know? How did he know, how did he know, how _did he know…_

            “Wh-what?” she asked, and she cursed her stilted speech.

            “I think that it’s easy to see when someone’s had to tense at the sound of loud noises. Of shouting, and heavy hands. That’s why I ask, Evie, how long you’ve been afraid. Because I don’t think it was just when we found you broken down on the side of the road. I think you’ve never had a chance to feel safe, to look around you and not have to wonder just what’s coming next.”

            Her skin felt clammy despite the hot air. When he took a step closer, she didn’t move.

            “And it _shows_ ,” he revealed softly. “I saw it, much like you see my tattoos and my scars when you look at me. Doesn’t it make you feel lost, Evie? Like somehow you’re drifting, and you’re not quite sure where you’ll end up? Like there’s no hope in the world, and you have to live every second realizing that you’re just as alone as you always feared?”

            She nodded curtly, once.

            “I felt much the same, too, until my brother found me again. The Father saw the Light, had found his place and been revealed a plan from God to save us all. When he came to me, I was just as untrustworthy of him as you naturally are –how could someone like that hear the word of God? How could God of all people be real when things like _that_ happen to people like you and me?

            “How could he promise me such a safe space when all I’d ever known was to be afraid?”

            His words were like a drug, something both soothing and raw in its realities. She looked again at the scars on him, at the tattoos like brands across forearms tanned from hard labor in the sun. It was an odd mix, in truth, his straight nose and his ragged chest. His neatly combed hair and the scars raised up in defiance.

            She looked to his eyes, and to her surprise he was staring back with that secretive little smile again. He could see her. Bare-boned, stripped down to the bits that made her tick. Evie felt oddly naked.

            “I think you and I have a lot in common, Evie Kincaid,” he said, and he held his hands out in supplication. “When you’re done being afraid, you come and find me. I’ll be more than happy to help you find what you’re looking for.”

            And before she could blink, before she could think to respond, he was turning around and aiming in the direction of the deputy who’d just emerged from behind a tree, firing at her with rapid succession. How the hell he’d unholstered his gun so fast, she couldn’t say, but Evie didn’t wait around to ask.

            She had no choice but to turn and run, praying that John Seed didn’t follow.

-

            It wasn’t the run that caught her, but the fall.

            It was first one foot, then another; she found herself tumbling before she could grab onto something and hold, and after several flips and twists, ass over end, Evie found herself spread-eagle in a dip in the ground, the wind knocked out of her.

            The gunfire hadn’t stopped, no matter how far she ran. It was teasing, quick reports that cracked the air and left the sound stagnant in the aftermath. Had they gotten the deputy again? Had John merely used his concern as a guise to make the deputy think he didn’t know exactly where she was and what she was doing?

            How the _fuck_ had he known about her father?

            Unnecessary details. It was an easy guess, one that she shouldn’t dwell on. Most families had a troublesome member, one that stirred the shit and made life difficult for everyone else. Most families had that one member that became so piss drunk it was difficult to know where the liquor ended and they began.

            And yet the look in his eyes, though…

            When she caught her breath, Evie dragged herself to her feet and continued on. She wasn’t sure just how much more she could take before she gave out.

-

            The deputy was pinned, and shit didn’t look good.

            “Eli, I know I been real quiet lately, but if you’ve got some guys on the out and about, I’m stuck here in the gorge. I’ll send you coordinates, but John Seed’s got his boys and I’m hurtin’ for cover,” she said. The radio remained static, no response. Just across the hill, John’s men were firing with an almost lazy sort of aim, like they didn’t quite care if they hit their mark. Guessing John’s state of mind, maybe they didn’t. The deputy had been cleansed already –now they just needed to make her confess. Why kill her when they could make her Confess? Why kill her when they could make her _bleed_?

            “That’s an interesting woman you’ve picked up!” John shouted across the way once the firing stopped. The peggies were reloading. “Are you sure she’s on your side?”

            “Not on anyone’s side,” the deputy muttered, and she leaned over the log to shoot. The first missed, but the second shot found its mark right between the eyes, and the man taking the lead dropped into the hot sun to bleed out. She didn’t have to imagine the hole that’d burst through his skull. She’d seen enough head wounds to know the image his men got of him as he died. It was never their living face the friends remembered, but how gruesome and grotesque they looked in death.

            “Eli, I don’t care if it’s a fucking drunk you send stumbling along, but I’ve got someone out here that hasn’t a lick of experience and off in the woods alone. If you could track her for me, get her somewhere safe, then I’ll manage on my own. I’ll rendezvous when I can, but for now…I could really use the Whitetails.” The deputy gritted her teeth. Needing people wasn’t her forte. “I could really use some help.”

            And it was then, then and only then that she heard it: the music.

            Faint at first, but growing, something that tore along the edges of her mind, left her grasping at her skull as she fell to her knees, shaking. Where was it coming from? An access road? Someone coming up an animal trail?

            “No, no, no, no, _no_ ,” she chanted, but it grew ever louder, rattling in the roots of her teeth until a darkness began to take hold, something that chewed through her vision with a primal hunger until all that she could see was red.

            And then there was nothing at all.

-

            Evie collapsed in a small dip in the mountain that, at a distance, had appeared to be the entrance to a cave. It wasn’t a cave, though, just an alcove. She wondered if the deputy would have known that.

            She wondered if the deputy was okay.

            She couldn’t continue on much farther, though. Her legs were trembling from the arduous panic, and adrenaline was ebbing, a wave that’d crested that now found itself pulling back with nothing but fatigue and pain to keep her company.

            And John was at the heart of it, offering a hand and an understanding word.

            Evie didn’t have the pack; Deputy Ridley did. Just what was she to do, wait until she was found? Wait until the peggies strolled in, fixed guns on her, and declared her Joseph’s bride? Her chest heaved with the effort of trying to calm her breath, panting from her at the intense and unending run uphill.

            She had to get going –it was the where of it that frightened her. The unknowing. She was in the wilderness of a place whose people either were fighting for their lives, or they wanted to end hers.

            Grace didn’t come with a map that fell from the sky, but from the cracking of a twig underfoot. A silent groan, and she was on her feet, gaze cast about for cover, for something better than the meager offering the alcove gave. When a man rounded the corner, bow drawn and taut, she held her hands up in supplication, that god damn trembling all over.

            John said that fear was healthy. It reminded you of what you had to lose.

            “…Evie Kincaid?” the man ventured. His beard was wild, his sharp eyes wilder. If the weight of the bow troubled his arm, it didn’t show. Most of him blended into the mountainside, all browns and greens with grey streaks between. Even his cheeks had been painted, to better mask himself with the environment.

            He was on the hunt.

            “Who are you?” she asked –demanded. It sounded stronger than she knew herself to be.

            “My name is Eli, and I’m with the Whitetails. The deputy asked me to find you because she’s indisposed, and you need help.”

            “You’re not…you’re not with the cult?”

            He smiled grimly, deep grooves of lines along his cheeks and about his eyes. A lifetime of sun and hard work in the elements. “They hate my guts. The feeling’s mutual.”

            And that is how Evie found herself once again making a dangerous trek up the side of the mountain in search of a bunker that the peggies didn’t know about. She wasn’t quite sure if this Eli was just who it was that the deputy was thinking of taking her to, but at the moment she felt rather out of options, her calves shaking with every step.

            If she lived through this, she was getting a fucking gym membership.

            “I never saw John come up so far north before,” said Eli. “Was he hunting dep?”

            Evie wasn’t quite sure what to give away in regards to information. When he glanced back at her, she nodded.

            “And dep was just trying to get you to me,” he mused, and he found small pockets of trail to pick his way up a steep incline. Where he used only his feet, Evie had to lean over onto her hands to haul herself up, the air in her lungs short and hot.

            “Thank you,” she managed at the top.

            “The Whitetails always lend a helping hand,” Eli assured her, and once at the top they began a casual descent into a small depression in the mountain. At the bottom, it was flat, and at the sight of a giant, metal door in the ground, Evie felt the beginnings of what could _maybe_ be called relief.

            That is, if he was who he said he was. If he was the one the deputy had called on for help.

            He punched in a code, and the doors let out a hissing noise as the locks turned and the latch gave way. Eli opened the door whose maw gave way to metal steps descending into a muted red light, and he looked back to her with a friendly smile.

            “Rest assured, it’ll be a story over dinner, but I’m curious as to how you tie in,” he said, and he gestured for her to walk down the steps. “The deputy don’t usually take too much mind to people unless it’s a kind of life or death sort of thing. She’s a busy woman and all.”

            “It’s exactly that,” Evie promised, and with no other apparent option in sight, she descended into the red and the dark.

-

            The deputy hated cages.

            Be it when she was a kid and they kenneled her mother’s dog every night, or going to zoos and watching how animals paced, bored, she hated cages.

            At least she could say that her cage was large enough to stand up in. The dog’s only option was to lay down until they let him loose. He yapped the whole damn night, too.

            “Oh, pup,” Jacob sighed. “What are we going to do with you.”

            He was seated just outside of her cage, as normal. The smell of grease, fire, and unwashed bodies permeated the air around her, and somewhere in the distance she could hear gunfire and screaming. Another conditioning routine. Someone was being brainwashed, and those that were weak were dying from it.

            _You are Strong. Only the Strong Survive._

“Did you honestly think you were free?” he wondered when she didn’t speak. “Did you honestly think that I couldn’t just…snap my fingers and bring you back to me?”

            “More of a bird than a dog, since it only takes a song,” Rook returned.

            Jacob found that funny. He didn’t laugh outright, but he dragged his thumb and index finger along the length of his jawline, considering her. At the last moment, it slid across his lips to wipe the laugh away.

            “I heard you questioned some of my men that you found on the road. Lined them up, one-by-one, and shot the ones that wouldn’t tell you the song,” he revealed. “When the final guy said I never told them, or anyone for that matter, you took his hand and sent him back to me.”

            “Nailed it on a post as a sign.”

            “With the middle finger up, yeah. I recall.”

            Rook didn’t make herself small where Jacob was concerned. He thought of himself as an alpha, so she sat with her legs spread out and wide, her hands propped behind her to keep herself upright. She was a fucking alpha, too. He sat with his legs spread, shoulders wide and chest naturally up and out. Although he was much, much larger, she wondered if he saw her stance as an insult, that she wouldn’t curl up and cower around him. Pound for pound, he may have more on her, but she wasn’t inclined to necessarily go down without taking an ear or two off. She wouldn’t die without a fight.

            Only he was a fucking cheater and took control without her consent. Called her weak.

            _Your body is eating your muscles. Probably why you’re so scrawny. Starvation does that._

            “See, problem is that you’re not supposed to be out of the cage. Your little escape made some trouble.”

            Her mind leapt to Pratt, prisoner and yet…not. Free to roam, free to have run of the place because Jacob knew that all he had to do was snap his fingers and the guy was right there, shaking in his boots. Jacob called him Weak, and sometimes, given how she’d first witnessed Pratt as Jacob’s personal servant of sorts, Rook was inclined to agree. She hated herself for that. She hated that sometimes, his intrusive thoughts took over and she slotted people into two categories:

            Strong. Weak. Alive. Dead.

            Evie Kincaid was on a needlepoint, it seemed. Sometimes she was strong. Sometimes she was weak. Maybe that was just the human condition, only Jacob’s conditioning made it harder and harder to see sometimes. Sometimes, people were so slow, so poor in the resistance that Rook wanted to scream, wanted to tell them that of _course_ they were going to die with how much they hesitated just to change clips. Of _course_ they were going to die, being so careless as that. So Weak as that.

            She woke up shaking a lot. She had Jacob and that fucking song to thank for that.

            “You didn’t kill my man, did you?” she asked. “Pratt?”

            Jacob couldn’t quite hold back the laugh, then. “Yeah, that little bitch is running around here. He knows his place the way you don’t.”

            “I know my place,” Rook assured him. She jutted her chin out, furious. _To fucking kill you._

            “You really…really don’t, though. If you did, you’d know that that wasn’t _your_ man, the same way as you’d know that just like he’s the bitch I keep at my heel, you’re the pup that is still in need of some finer training, some…finesse. We’re not finished, yet.”

            She waited for the music, for that box to come into view, for the time when her world would turn and she’d face a darkness so encompassing that sometimes it felt as though she’d never woken from it. In between the hazes of shooting, of killing, of waking up in a pile of bodies knowing she’d been the one to put them there, sometimes she’d feel his hands on her cheeks, turning her face one way, then another. Her breath would be labored, her teeth would be bared, and the worst of it was that sometimes, _sometimes_ she’d see his expression and know it to be _pride_. He was fucking proud of her –of what he’d made of her.

            A tool to be used and discarded.

            The music box wasn’t removed from his pocket, though. Rook stared, waiting with bated breath, but Jacob Seed stood and tucked his hands into his pockets, casual.

            “Before we begin, there’s someone that has a few questions for you. He’s the reason I had to hunt you down so quickly,” Jacob informed her. He strode out into the training grounds, his aged and weathered military jacket the only thing she could see as the smoke swallowed him whole.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading!


	6. 1990 Ford Ranger

Chapter 6:

            Rook didn’t like change. Rook didn’t like Joseph-fucking-Seed.

            Sure as hell, though, she was adaptable for it. Change, not Joseph Seed. The military made it easy to adapt, easy to try and roll with the punches in order to do what was best for the squad or the platoon. If one didn’t adapt, they died, plain and simple. Easy didn’t mean one enjoyed it, though. A person changed like that when they had to, not when they wanted to. A person changed like that when there was no other choice.

            Out of all of the Seed brothers, it was Joseph Seed that she feared over any other; she loathed Jacob, she wanted to destroy John, but it was Joseph that she feared.

            Where the other two only knew how to control and destroy, Joseph knew how to make a person Change.

            He sat there in front of her, calm as a southern spring. She hadn’t really seen a spring in Hope County to compare him to. She’d shown up just around the turn of summer, when the heat set in and the mountains exploded in rivers of wildflowers that blanketed hills in violet and sunlight. She’d seen many calm springs, though, growing up in the South. Even before Foster Care, she’d seen calm springs. Undisturbed, shallow ponds whose banks were soon to overflow with the rains, a breeze that carried over the plains a few hours south of Atlanta. It rippled wheat fields, left promise and the smell of grain in the air, coupled with the never-ending humidity and the fucking bugs.

            In truth, Rook didn’t miss the bugs in the south, although she certainly missed the south itself. She’d trade all the mountainous splendor of Montana if it meant she could go back to the south and skip out on the bugs. Cockroaches. Black Widows. Brown Recluses. Screaming cicadas.

            “You remember the first time we met?” she asked. She didn’t like waiting for Joseph Seed to speak. He took his time sometimes, lost in thought as he was with the doom and gloom of his apocalyptic world. Despite being caged, she really didn’t have time for that shit.

            Rook just hoped to hell that Eli had gotten someone to Evie Kincaid in time. She hoped he wasn’t mad she’d skipped out of the mountains once again without an explanation.

            “When you attempted to arrest me?” he asked. Even in the gloom of the evening, he wore his tinted glasses. At least the bastard put a shirt on, buttoned crisp as you please with the cuffs rolled at the elbow. She wondered if he took styling tips from John, or if John took his cues from his older brother. Her own clothing was sorely lacking finesse; she couldn’t remember the last time she’d honestly just washed her hair.

            “No, the first time,” she corrected. “At the welcoming party Fall’s End hosted after I was brought onto the force. Faith introduced us, said you were The Father of the church ‘Project at Eden’s Gate’ and that it was a treat for you to show up to something like that –a festival for sinners wasn’t your forte, normally. Y’all kept to the church, mostly. Drove up in a Ford Ranger, if I recall.”

            She hated that she talked around him. Other people didn’t make her want to talk so much. She figured, she talked and it kept him from talking, from spilling that Bliss around them where her mind became muddied and poor, disoriented. She was pliable in the Bliss. Changeable.

            “Yes, I recall.”

            “I held my hand out, and you shook it.”

            “That was a defining moment for you,” Joseph remembered. “You asked me what sort of religious man I was –if I was a Shephard or a Prophet.”

            “Prophets think they’re above their fold, distant and untouchable despite their claim to love and cherish those whom God blesses. Shepherds are always among the flock, guarding and protecting. When they called you ‘The Father’ I was curious as to what kind of ‘chosen’ you thought yourself to be.”

            Joseph tilted his head slightly. She’d peaked his curiosity. “Do you believe that the two can’t be synonymous? That one can’t be a shepherd and a prophet?”

            “Mormons have a prophet, but he doesn’t go and kiss babies on the street. He has a guard on him at all times, and although he preaches love to his people, he is not among the people. His rank and position is most-assuredly above theirs in every way, and they know it. They love him for it.”

            “Whereas you’d see me in a different light, a shepherd that guides his children to the light?” he wondered. She could sense it, his hesitation. He knew she was walking him towards a trap, but where she’d spring it, he couldn’t say.

            Which was nice, despite the imbalance of their positions: her in her cage, him in the chair just beside it. Close enough to touch. Close enough to hurt him good, if she was fast enough.

            “I think _you_ think you’re a shepherd. _You_ think you’re chosen. But when the gunfire started just outside of your church, I didn’t see your face, Joseph Seed. I saw John, I saw your men and women dying, but I didn’t see _you_.”

            He looked pained at that, and that was the worst of it to Rook. It was different with John, staring him down as he whispered treacherous, ugly things about how to torture, how to maim and truly draw out the pain in another human being. Jacob was methodical in his cruelty, searching for that tipping point on the needle between Strong and Weak and organizing accordingly. He didn’t spout off about God, glory, or the ‘garden’; mostly, he focused on building an army to rape the world of its resources for the survival of their people.

            Joseph, though…Joseph truly believed. A genuine believer was so much more difficult to reason with. A genuine believer made them seem much less like the monsters in her nightmares, but real people instead.

            It wasn’t impossible to kill real people, but it made it just a little bit harder.

            “When I came out into the courtyard, I didn’t see you, either,” he said quietly. “But I did see my wife crest just over the hill as you took her away from me. You stole from me, my child. Once again, you’ve sinned against me while I try to show mercy.”

            She considered telling him that John had set him up, knowingly bringing another woman before him and dressing her up as his deceased wife, Lilith. She wondered the repercussions for the little brother, how Joseph would be disappointed and above all, hurt. Would he close the gates of Eden to him? Would he cast him out, one mistake too many on the back of a man that branded sins into the flesh of the innocent? She opened her mouth, then closed it; Evie Kincaid’s safety hung in the balance, much like her Strength and her Weakness. She couldn’t be sure what Joseph would do, should he even believe her over John.

            “Can’t steal what was begging to be taken,” she said with a sneer. “Your wife wanted to get as far away from you as possible, Joseph Seed. What’d you do, admit to her that you murdered her child? How was the happy reunion with _that_ elephant in the room?”

            That struck him. In the time it took for her to blink, he was standing, pressed a breath away from the bars of the cage. In that moment, he was ethereal, encased in the red glow of the bonfires in the distance, the darkness eking away at the edges and leaving him sinister, dangerous. She thought of the story he’d told, grievous and vulnerable. How he’d taken his newborn and murdered her. How a life had been stolen, all in the name of God.

            “Everything I have done, I have done in the name of God,” he said hoarsely. “If you had any compassion, you wouldn’t make light of what weighs on me, even as I continue on the Path to Eden. I do as I must, for when the Voice calls to me I am beholden to listen and obey.”

            “Compassion, says the man to the prisoner in a cage,” she retorted, and she stood as well, furious. “In the name of God, but as a shepherd surely you should first protect, not destroy? When does it stop being in the name of God, and instead is seen for what it truly is: a sick, sadistic fantasy played out by a man that got so tired of losing that instead of backing out of the game, he decided to just start killing off other players.”

            “I will save you, Deputy Ridley,” Joseph vowed. “From yourself, and from your sins.”

            “The only rescuing I need is from you and yours.”

            He shook his head, adamant. She wondered if the shine in his eyes was from a fevered dream, or the Bliss that he surely had in his system every time she’d seen him.

            “From your sins I will raise you, that if you of all can be saved then any may come and heed the call of God, his Light and his Voice.”

            “What a load of _fucking –_ ”

“‘I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him. And power was given unto them over the fourth part of the earth, to kill with sword and with hunger, and with death, and with the beasts of the earth.’”

            “Are you Hell in this scripture, or me?” Rook hissed, stepping closer to the bars of the cage. Her heart beat a rhythm just behind her eye, fury a livid stain that spread with each thud. She could hear John now, triumphant: _you are wrath._ “Because the way I see it, you were the one that first started killing with hunger, buying land and farms from those that haven’t the means of living. You were the first to start taking, leaving nothing behind but bodies in the wake of your gluttony. _You_ and _only_ you were the one to take the beasts of the earth and turn them on the souls of the living, not I. Who’s Hell here, Joseph? Because if God is watching, you’re going to have a lot to answer for when I finally get a bullet right between your brows. If I’m Hell, it’s only because God knows there’s nothing in Heaven that can put a stop to you, so he had to settle for _me_ to finish the job _._ ”

            Too soon she realized she’d stalked to the bars, pressed close enough to touch. In the late afternoon sun, he smelled of the hot air, smoke, and sweat, and as he leaned down, nose-to-nose, her breath caught and held tight in her throat. Something in his eyes always made her afraid. When she looked to them, impossibly blue and impossibly kind despite the wicked things he said, she hated herself for seeing that –his fucking humanity. It made her feel cornered, as though there was nowhere she could go that he would not see.

            “…Who made you so cruel?” he asked, and the worst of it was that he seemed to want to genuinely _know_. Even in his pain, he cared. “Your face tells me that you firmly believe you are Hell, that you are the personification of Wrath as John tells me. And yet when I look into your eyes, child, I see a suffering that made you cruel when you could have been kind. I wonder what sins were first cast onto you that you took them and made them your own.”

            “Nothing in this world could make me confess it,” she promised, and her voice softened to match his. “Same as nothing in this world is going to get me to give up Lilith Seed so long as she’s afraid of you and what your love really entails.”

            She wasn’t quick enough; Joseph reached forward and grasped the back of her neck with one hand, expression still cruelly kind. With the other hand, he lifted a small dusting of Bliss and blew sharply. Too slow, _too slow_ , and it was in her eyes, her nose, coating her throat in small particles that tasted of green things and a sickeningly sweet burn. Her tongue scraped frantically at the roof of her mouth.

            No. No, no, _no_.

            She tried to push away from him, hands clawing at his chest, but he held her still, expression fixed on her face as her expression slowly slackened, softened. She hated how instantaneous it was, a shimmering dancing light that encased her with the sort of warmth that made muscles lax. Why fight? Why was she fighting?

            _What are you fighting for?_

            Her hands softened against his chest as her breathing slowed, calmed. The hand at the nape of her neck soothed along the sun-abused skin, and she mimicked the action, smoothing the ripples of fabric along his shirt. It was calm in the Bliss. Everything was calm, light. Why had she tried to hurt him? Why had she tried to pull away?

            Rook looked up to his face once more, only it wasn’t so cruel as before. How could it have been? Mercy ten-fold, a love so deep that it made her knees weak, for how could someone love so fully when the world was so utterly wicked? How could he see her for what she was and not pull away from her, disgusted? When she saw her own hands, her own face in the reflection, she saw just what it was inside of her: ichor, black and tar-like. A hunger. A cruelty. Wrath. She was Hell, she was Wrath. She would tear his foundations down.

            “You have been used,” The Father murmured, and she held still as he touched the sides of her neck, his palms warm as they reached up to cradle her face. “A tool that has been discarded as seen fit rather than loved as you so deserve. Who first hurt you? Who first gave you over to sin?”

            She opened her mouth to answer, but something stuck fast, held. She saw flashing lights, red and blue that circled as her parents were taken away and never seen again. Fists that fell, first rough then accusatory, a bed whose covers were the only solace –but could mere blankets keep the monsters at bay? The reek of burning chemicals, of body odor and Windex as pupils dilated. The cop had held her hand as she stood by the flashing red and blue. But in a blink, his face was melting, the scene was melting, wax dripping under a livid sun, and suddenly it was no longer the cop holding her hand as her parents were taken away, but Joseph Seed, comforting a lost child with a mind too clouded to think straight.

            She pressed her palm to his, held his hand against her cheek as she shook like a leaf. He was there as her parents were taken away, there to comfort her as she asked every question under the sun except ‘When are they coming back?’. He was The Father, the comfort and the calm. She was wrath, only it didn’t stir inside of her anymore. Much like he smoothed her hair back from her face, brushed away the flyaways, he eased over her ragged breathing, left her skin humming with the contact.

            “Your hands are powerful tools,” he intoned, gentle. His eyes left her face, traced over her knuckles scabbed and bruised from the last peggie that’d dared to cross her path. She let go of him in order to look to her hands, breath catching at the sight of how _ugly_ they were. “People don’t appreciate hands; they take for granted that through these we feel, touch, turn, create, and destroy. Our hands are tools, and you have used yours to carve destruction, child. It was not always this way.”

            “No,” she managed to say. “I help.”

            She was there by the flashing lights that turned, turned, turned. Joseph took her hands, turned them one way, then the other. She was nine, and her hands were small. They hadn’t yet broken flesh, bruised skin and sundered bone. Rook blinked, and she was once more in the cage, The Father turning her hands one way, then the other. She didn’t recognize these hands. She didn’t recognize herself anymore. Hadn’t in a long time.

            “Do you look at these hands and believe that you help?” he wondered, gentle. “When you look at your hands, do you see a lifetime of sin, or do you honestly believe your hands are made of help?”

            _He’s in your head, he’s in your head, he’s in your head…_

“You’re…you’re in my head,” said Rook, and she leaned forward, forehead pressed to the metal. Still, he held her hands and studied them, his finger carving a path on her lifeline. “Can’t you see for yourself?”

            He could see. He helped her into the cop car, closed the door and drove her away. She’d be safe now, he was saying. The Father took her from her parents, and she never again had to hide. Never again did she have to run into the house from the bus stop just in time to see mom and dad, pupils impossibly wide, laying about on the couch with the stench of burning body odor in the air.

            Never again, The Father promised. Never again.

            “Where is Lilith, child? If your hands are made to help, surely you will help me? Where did you put my wife?”

            And in the end, she pressed her forehead to his chest, shaking all over as the lights danced before her eyes, taunting her. He was close enough to touch, so close she could smell the sun and dirt within the fibers of his shirt. If only she’d had the desire, the urge to kill him as she did before, and the leader of the fucking cult would be dead.

            “I don’t know,” she whispered into his shirt, closing her eyes against the dizziness that threatened to take her deeper into the darkness of the Bliss. “Father, I’m sorry, I don’t _know_.”

-

            The bunker housing the Whitetails and a large portion of the reconnaissance team of the resistance was build into the mountain that Evie had struggled to climb so desperately earlier that day.

            It wasn’t much of a reconnaissance team, much the same way that the residents of Hope County couldn’t really call themselves a resistance. They were ragtag, only mildly organized, and entirely unsure of exactly what was going to happen next. It was something, though.  They sure as hell weren’t giving up without a fight. They kept close watch on the monitors and radio, reporting the whereabouts and places of the peggies at any given time on the public roads and forest.

            “I saw dep pulled down here, drawing fire away from where she hoped you were headed,” Eli explained, gesturing. The areas that Deputy Ridley had taken her on before were crawling with peggies, people searching. No sign of the deputy, though. The sun was beginning to set.

            “Do you see where she went?”

            Eli’s face was roughened from the elements underneath the camouflage he’d painted on in order to better hunt. He scratched idly at a spot and shook his head. “That’s the hell of it. No, I don’t.”

            “Where does your reach end with these?” Evie asked.

            “Once you start getting into their private property or hit the main road headed out of the mountains, that’s where I can’t see. I figure they’ve either got her, or she got out of the mountains as fast as she could. Those are the two options I can wrap my head around.”

            The unspoken third option kept Evie quiet through most of dinner: _or she’s dead._

Evie wasn’t quite sure what she’d do if the deputy had died trying to get her to safety. Evie was just one person, and the deputy…

            Well, given how everyone spoke of her, how their voices gentled and hushed with awe, Evie was certain that should they find that poor woman’s body, no one would see it as an even trade. Not even Evie.

            “Haven’t seen her in a while,” Eli continued, studying the cameras. He’d eaten quickly so that he could barrage Evie with questions, each one more difficult to answer than the last: who are you, where’d you come from, why did you stop in Hope County, why did John take you to their main compound, why did ‘dep’ abandon her initial mission to rescue you, _why are the peggies so hell bent on finding you_.

            “Before this?” Evie asked.

            Eli nodded somberly. “She was helping us, working hard on pushing Jacob and his nut jobs out of the mountains. She and I figured, we take out their main place for training recruits, and it really hurts their ability to hurt us. We take out their Judges, their traps to hurt other wildlife, and their best soldiers, we really cripple these bastards.

            “Then, one day she goes off on her own, since dep likes to tell us she prefers to work alone, and nothing. Gone. Tried reaching out on our radio to her, but silence. Heard it through one of my men doing recon down a little more south that she was over near the farmlands, pissing off John Seed and shooting down billboards.”

            “Maybe,” Evie said hesitantly, “maybe she trusted you’d take care of things up here, but the people down at the farms could use some help. She told me that she trusted you more than she trusted herself.”

            “Dep’s pretty god damn hard on herself if she’d say something like that,” Eli retorted, scowling at the monitors. “We wouldn’t be where we are if it weren’t for her.”

            _If he gets you, he gets in your head. Makes you something you’re not. Makes you turn on people, hurt people._

Evie thought of the deputy in the car, purposefully playing cult music as opposed to risking any other music at all. The day before that, she’d even commented on a pop version to a song that she’d likely listened to a dozen times. Evie wasn’t sure if it was really her place to share something like that; if they’d turn on the deputy if they knew Jacob had done… _something_ to her. Would the resistance crumble without her? From the way the Whitetails sounded, yes.

            Evie remained firmly quiet about why the deputy felt the need to stay away. She also remained quiet about why Joseph Seed was after her, too.

            She was given the couch and an apology, as all the bunks were taken for the night. Everyone except for Eli gave her a wide, respectable berth, and one of them was kind enough to reassure her when she started hearing screams just down the hall.

            “That’s just Tammy trying to get a peggie to tell her what we need to know,” they said, and even hours after, Evie was puzzling those words out and just how… _wrong_ they were.

            The peggies were torturing and murdering the locals of Hope County. Hope County residents, in fear for their life, were torturing paranoid Christian folks. Right or wrong, who started or who finished it, either way it was a shit deal. Either way, innocent people were getting hurt.

            The deputy had cautioned her not to try and imagine this as America, but as she drifted into an anxious sleep, the only thing she could think of was John Seed with his hands outstretched, offering to understand.

-

            It took three days for them to hear from the deputy. Evie was startled awake from her makeshift bed on the couch in the middle of the night by the sound of stools scraping and metal clanking, everything muffled and faraway.

            “Jesus, dep, you scared the hell out of me coming in like that,” Eli was saying, hushed.

            Evie stared at the ceiling above, the faint glow from the television monitors casting shadows that danced about as the deputy settled into a chair. Sleep was a groggy fog, and she wondered what time it was.

            “Got delayed,” dep said, and she sounded monumentally exhausted. “Sorry, Eli.”

            “No need for sorry, we were just worried. I couldn’t see you on any of the monitors, and –”

            “I led them on a wild goose chase,” she cut in smoothly. “They almost got me a couple of times, but I managed to lose them down where the road splits towards Faith. Had to lay low for a bit and work my way up again.”

            “That explains why they were crawling all over these mountains in those damn trucks.”

            The deputy was quiet. There was the muffled scrape and scuff of coffee cups on the table, the soft clearing of throats.

            “How is she?” the deputy asked after awhile.

            “Scared as hell, but she’s trying,” Eli replied.

            “She’s trying,” the deputy echoed. Then, “I can’t find a single spot to get her out of here. She’s not from around here, Eli. She don’t belong here.”

            “Portland, yeah, she told me. Maybe her going missing, if they tie it to here then something happens and the feds will finally see what’s going on here?”

            “…Doubtful. People leave home all the time and never come back. Unless she told people she was coming here, they wouldn’t tie her to Hope County. She had to take some kind of wrong turn to wind up here. Pray to the Seed’s God she used a credit card at a gas station nearby.”

            There was a snorting, soft huff of laughter. Then quiet once more, save for the humming of the computer monitors. Evie stared up at the ceiling and counted her breaths, each one slower than the last. She wanted to hear more of their planning, but it seemed that Eli and the deputy’s friendship and connection was the quiet, steady sort that didn’t need words and constant verbal communication. If their trek through the wild forests of Montana seemed quiet to Evie at the time, this was even moreso. It felt comfortable, though. The kind of comfort someone could fall asleep to.

            “Why’d you go radio silent, dep?” Eli finally asked, just as Evie was drifting off. “Why’d you run off without a word to let us know not to worry so damn much?”

            And although Evie tried to stay awake to hear the answer, sleep overcame her before she could hear the deputy more than likely telling a really, really good lie.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading!


	7. 1995 Toyota Tacoma

Chapter 7:

            Deputy Ridley woke Evie in the early hours of the morning. Evie wondered if the deputy didn’t particularly _like_ sleep, or if there was just too much to do with not a lot of time to do it. In Portland, everyone kept odd hours depending on their line of work or where they lived. Everything was fast paced, yet people still found the time to sleep in. In Hope County, it seemed to be the exact opposite. Sleep was for the dead.

            “How’s your wounds?” the deputy asked over a cup of coffee and some toast. She inspected Evie over the rim of her cup critically.

            “Not to sound like a wuss, but I hurt everywhere,” Evie replied. “Just a lot of bruises, though, nothing broken. Eli helped me rebandage my wrists, and they’re doing much better.”

            Deputy Ridley hummed lightly and took a sip from her cup. “We’ll get some poultices on them.”

            “ _Poultices?_ ”

            She glanced up. “Yeah, poultices. Y’all don’t use those in Portland?”

            “I mean…some of us, yeah,” Evie reluctantly agreed. She hadn’t thought about medicine, how a small place like Hope County wouldn’t have hospitals to access actual medication. Had the deputy learned to make poultices just to stay alive? What happened if a wound was far past what their mediocre medicines could do?

            “Helps with bruises and stings a hell of a lot less,” the deputy said, stirring a bit of sugar into her coffee. “We use morphine and ibuprofen when appropriate.”

            “Oh, that’s…a relief.”

She grinned over the lip of her cup. “We’re not _savages_.”

            Evie caught on much faster than the last time that the deputy was telling another dry joke.

            They went out into the cold morning, dew still collected on the leaves and sparse grass. A small hill of scrub brush and sage led them to a dip in the ground where water had collected to one side, and wooden palates were leaned against two desolate trees. The sun was steadily rising, streaks of gold against the mountainside. So entranced was Evie by the sight of it, majestic even in the face of her own mortal danger, when the deputy pressed a pistol into her hand, she almost dropped it, surprised at the weight.

            The deputy caught it and held it by the barrel, watching Evie.

            “What are you passing me that for?” Evie asked, hesitant to grab it once more.

            “You need to learn to shoot a gun.”

            “I…I don’t know how to feel about guns,” she replied.

            The deputy’s placid expression didn’t shift the slightest. “They’re mighty indifferent to you, but your enemies don’t have the same reservations as either one of you. They love guns. They love to shoot guns, carry guns, sing about guns, and kill people with guns. So you should learn how to shoot a gun.”

            Evie thought of the casual way that John had carried his pistol, how he’d swung with cruel efficiency to shoot at the deputy in the glade. How his hands had been outstretched in supplication, waiting for Evie to _want_ to come to him.

            She gripped the pistol a little tighter and nodded. She couldn’t just wait around for someone else to protect her.

            The deputy was surprisingly a good teacher. Her voice and tone didn’t waver, even as Evie’s arms wavered about clumsily, trying to aim, or when she had to lower her arms to study the target, frustrated. There was a calmness to her as she taught Evie about the gun, like this was second-nature, like there was nothing else in the world but time and the gun in Evie’s hand.

            The first shot took her a half-step back where the deputy caught her and nudged her up once more with a soft, encouraging, “Good.” The next, she rocked back a little, but she held her stance.

            After the first clip, the deputy loaded another pistol and stood just beside her, showing her rather than just telling.

            “See the widespread pattern you’ve got here?” The deputy gestured towards the target where Evie’s bullets were random and sporadic. “You aren’t going to get bullseye first shot. That’s horseshit they sell you in movies to make people think they wake up knowing how to kill with a gun. But you keep working on your spread, make it smaller and smaller, and you’ll get your way to that bullseye every time after. It takes practice.”

            “You’re not going to ask me to envision my worst enemy so that I’m enraged to hit the mark, are you?” Evie asked. “I don’t have that good of an imagination.”

            The deputy smiled wryly, a slow and hesitant thing. “You shoot that gun thinking about who you’re killing rather than _how_ you’re killing, you’re gonna have a bad time.”

            “Oh?”

            “I’m not teaching you so you can one day just walk up and shoot Joseph Seed between his eyes. You need to know how to shoot _anyone_ in front of you. Any danger. You imagine one person, maybe you desensitize yourself to the idea of shooting that person. It won’t be the same, though. Never is.” The deputy considered the targets in front of them, her spread of bullets having ripped a half-dollar sized hole in the bullseye. “But say one day someone’s in front of that gun that you’re _not_ prepared to shoot, that you didn’t practice shooting. Doesn’t stop the fact you gotta shoot them anyway, but maybe that time you hesitate rather than fire. In your weakness, you’re dead.”

            Evie could recall the words the deputy had shared as they crouched behind the trunk of an ancient tree: _Only the strong survive_.

            Evie wondered if the deputy was trying to get her comfortable with the thought of killing her, should Jacob’s song play at the wrong time.

            “How do you kill a person?” she asked, only that wasn’t quite what she meant to say. She’d never been good with words. She always seemed to say the wrong thing at the wrong time, fumbling and inarticulate.

            The deputy seemed to understand, though. She was quiet as she changed out the targets, quiet as she helped Evie with a casing jam in the barrel. It wasn’t until both clips were empty once more that she spoke, hands on her hips as she watched the brilliant morning sun glow a soft and teasing hum just along the ridge they’d hiked down, threatening to reveal itself.

            “With your head, not your heart,” she said at last. “Your head, when you set your emotions to the side, is logic. It’s a machine, meant to be utilized. Shoot where the danger is, Evie Kincaid, and you won’t fail. When that time comes, don’t hesitate. You decide then and there that it’s your life over theirs because their life is being used to hurt people. You only hurt them because they decided to try and hurt you first.”

            “I read a book once that said you shoot with your heart, not your head,” Evie replied, mouth dry. She felt oddly uncomfortable, seeing so far into the deputy’s train of thought like that.

            “Yeah, Stephen King’s a good author, but I don’t know if he’s ever shot anyone. Don’t trust him much to speak on it.”

            They both laughed, the warmth of the sunrise easing the chill and goosebumps on Evie’s arms, spread across the sparse grass and chasing the morning mists away. Somehow, seeing the deputy as someone that’d also read _The Dark Tower_ once upon a time made her a little more human, a little more tangible. Evie wondered just the sort of person she was before this had happened, what she’d aspired for and what she’d dared to dream.

            The two images didn’t quite blend, though. Maybe they never could.

            “Don’t limp wrist it,” the deputy said on the next round.

            “I don’t –”

            The deputy reached over and stiffened Evie’s wrist firmly. “You are. Hold here, and lemme…”

            She fixed Evie’s stance again, then let go. On the next shot, the bullet didn’t quite hit bullseye, but it got pretty damn close.

            “Better.”

            “Better?” Evie asked.

            The deputy smiled, flashing pearly whites. “Better.”

            Evie looked back to the target and emptied the clip. Still spread, but smaller. Getting better. “Did Jacob find you?” she asked, somehow brave from her success.

            The deputy exchanged targets. Evie tracked her tense back as she moved the decimated ones to the side, then headed back behind the ‘firing line’, as she’d dubbed the line she’d dragged in the ground with the toe of her boot.

            “Yeah.”

            “Am I in danger?”

            The deputy had to think about it for a while. “…Probably.”

            Evie waited until she felt brave enough. It took some time and a few more rounds close to the bullseye. The sun had fully revealed itself, promising to be a hot day. “Do you have a plan?”

            “Not at the moment. I’m nervous to leave where he steps in and asks where I found you. Maybe he already assumes. But I don’t want to walk you into a trap getting you somewhere else, either. Leaving you here might be for the best, but I can’t stay here. The longer I’m here…”

            The deputy didn’t finish her sentence. Maybe she couldn’t.

            “We’ll think of something,” Evie vowed. It was a confidant idea, considering the fact she hadn’t the foggiest idea as to how she’d ever be of help to the resistance. Maybe she’d suggest a wheat grass kombucha that changed their diet and their world.

            “Yeah, we’ll think of something,” the deputy agreed.

-

            The air was poison, but it went down sweet.

            Evie took a drag of it in, held it, then exhaled. Everything shimmered, lights flashing and glittering, a thousand places to see at once as she stumbled, caught herself. Evie turned, but it was somehow too quick; she spun, dizzied, and fell into waiting arms that held tight. She felt loved, at that moment. Good God, how long had it been since she felt loved?

            “You’re so alone,” a woman cooed, and everything was warm, so very warm.

            Evie looked to her face. Her mouth felt odd, fuzzy and somehow not quite attached to her. She inhaled another breath, and she was drowning, drowning again.

            “Don’t –” someone –a man? –warned. Their voices wavered, caught yet not held, a thought that came to mind just long enough to leave it.

            “I _know_ ,” the woman hissed, muted, but in a blink it wasn’t so much of a hiss as a warm hum as they turned, hand in hand, spinning. “I _know_ what you’re searching for,” she said lightly. She had a graceful tilt to her cheek.

            _What,_ Evie wanted to ask. _What, what._

“Your courage,” the woman whispered. “But really, I ask you: where’s your faith?”

            Evie was no longer spinning, and yet she was. She inhaled again, deep gulps of something closely resembling a breath that never quite caught. She stood overlooking hands open in supplication, insistent, and wind whipped below her feet. Hands were held to her. Hands that wanted to help. Where was she? How had she gotten there?

            “Where’s your faith?” the woman entreated, softly against her ear. “Where’s your faith?”

            _Where’s your courage, Evie? Where’s your faith?_

“I can _show_ you,” she crooned, and Evie nodded slowly. “All you have to do…is trust me, and take a leap of faith.”

            Evie gulped, and her knees locked, arms pinned to her sides. She felt fear as a burden, something heavy against her back that dug deep into the skin. The drop was far, clouds roiling like rough waves against the smoothed stone. She swayed towards it; she swayed away. Was this always the place that she was doomed to be? Always in the middle, too afraid to jump, but not strong enough to walk away?

            “Perhaps to find your faith, you have to find the courage to jump,” the woman suggested, and she laughed. It wasn’t so mocking, her laugh. Something told Evie that the two of them were long, fast friends.  “Do you need a little push?”

            And there was a hand just before her, inviting, beckoning. “I’ll jump with you,” he said, and it was warm, coaxing.

            Evie looked just before her, and her vision swam. Her father stood with his back straight and his smile warm, there a moment and the next gone. He was a proud man, and he’d never really looked at her like that before. Kind. She gulped in another gout of air. It was John Seed before her, and there was something mischievous in his eye. He was gone another moment, and her vision swam, dizzying.

            “Will you take my hand?” he asked, and it wasn’t her father. It wasn’t anyone, and then it was John; his smile was understanding. “Will you take a poor sinner’s hand?”

            _You’ve never had to fear your parents though, did you? Well…just one of them._

Evie nodded, and she placed her hand in his. Everything was soft; everything was light.

            “Yes.”

            And then they were falling; the air was rushing, her ears were roaring, and she thought of her father’s hands and how they always curled closed into hurt, into anger.

            “Are you afraid?” John Seed asked. She wondered how his voice could sound so clear when they were falling off of a pair of hands floating in the sky.

            Evie nodded.

            “Do you trust me?” John asked.

            Evie shook her head.

            And then they hit the ground, hard.

-

            It wasn’t death, but Evie sorta wished it was.

            She’d come to, disoriented, at the bottom of a steep incline. Her hands and feet were bound, but she was otherwise unscathed; they’d even left her in the pajama set she’d been given by the Whitetails. A spare set from one of the nearby houses. Jacob’s men hadn’t yet burned it down, they said, and the family was dead.

            Was it looting if the family was most certainly dead?

            She was carried out of the mountains across the back of a bearded cultist, much the same way a goat was. She felt the indignity of it, even as she was grateful that she didn’t have to walk barefoot. Someone had given her a fleece jacket before she’d come to. How long was she out? she’d asked, shaking.

            She’d been pointedly ignored.

            John Seed led the group. As her captor carried her, occasionally her head would bob and turn until she inadvertently saw him just ahead, leading them towards what she assumed was the main road. If he had the impulse to look back and mock her, he didn’t. After a prolonged time of the group walking in silence, she kept her eyes fixed to him whenever she had the chance, and somewhere along the way her fear bled to anger.

            _Do you trust me?_

            Crickets chirped with the rapidly rising sun. Evie’d thought about screaming, but she also thought about John’s mercy. His questions.

            When they stopped for a break, she was stood on her feet. Something took the weight out from under her, though, and she ended up slumping to the ground in a sort of huddle, the too-large jacket pooling around her ankles and knees. Her muscles were the aftermath of a bad bout of the flu. She wanted to take a nap.

            “It’s the Bliss,” a woman said, crouching down beside her. She smelled oddly of pressed flowers, the delicate scent of old book pages and something sour in between.

            Evie looked up to her, and she knew her face. “You tried to get me to sing with you at the compound,” she managed. She sounded hoarse, as though she’d been chain-smoking.

            “Compound?” the woman’s brow wrinkled, and she laughed delightedly. “Oh, you mean the church? It’s a church, silly. I was singing with some new followers of The Father’s word.”

            “A church,” Evie echoed. Something felt right to feel fear at the thought of the Father lurking about in his church, but everything was muddied, distorted and unclear in her mind.

            What the fuck had they given her? Bliss?

            _Oh, the bliss is gonna make you see._

“If that’s the first time you’ve ever had Bliss, it’s tiring when you come down,” the woman said soothingly. “You saw something beyond yourself. You had a remarkable spiritual experience.”

            “How did you find me?” Evie managed to ask. Her head felt good and fluffed, but the thoughts were slowly, surely beginning to stick better.

            The woman’s smile was coy. “The Bliss shows everything.”

            For a wild moment, Evie thought maybe the deputy had accidentally turned on her, but there was no ex-cop lurking about, doing…whatever it is that someone brainwashed would do after finishing their assigned task. In fact, the only other woman in the group apart from Evie was the one that sat just beside her, draped in a gossamer and flowy sun dress, feet bare-as-you-please.

            “And…who are you?”

            “I’m Faith. I’m John, Jacob, and Joseph’s sister.” She smiled, dimples deep in her cheeks. “I’m so, so happy to have met you, Lilith. I’ve never had a sister before!”

            A sister.

            _A sister_.

            “I’m…I’m not Lilith,” Evie said, and she shook her head, muddled. “I’m not Lilith, I’m Evie. Your brother’s lying to you, Faith.”

            “John wouldn’t lie. He’s the Baptist.”

            “I don’t…I don’t _care_ what he’s told you, I’m not your fucking sister, I’m not…I’m not Joseph Seed’s wife! I don’t even know that man!”

            Her mouth was moving without her consent, and she clasped her hands together tight in her binds, chafing over skin that’d finally begun to heal. At least she still had bandages on them.

            Faith stared at her, and despite the smile fixed to her face, her eyes hardened.

            “Look, John found me stranded on the edge of town, but I’m not even _from_ here. Woman to woman, you’ve gotta see that I don’t belong here, right? That I’m not from here?”

            Faith shook her head, and she laughed, delighted yet chilling at the same time. “No, silly, you just can’t remember! The Father said it was a test from God, and he immediately thought of me. That it was a test of his _faith_ to allow me to retrieve your memories for you, a time when you loved and remembered him.”

            _Oh, it’ll make you see._

_What will it make you see?_

_Shit._

“No,” Evie said, slowly.

            “I mean, it makes sense, doesn’t it? The sign from God?”

            “No, what…you don’t –”

            “You’re named Evie, after all, which is an awful lot like Eve. The woman that God chose for Adam _after_ Lilith. She wasn’t quite right the first time, but in a way she was made anew.”

            Evie shook her head, and she remembered backing away quickly, legs trembling and breath stuck. Then somehow, somewhere, everything exploded into a myriad of colorful bubbles, and she was inhaling them. Her vision blurred, her breath felt like an overfilled balloon, and through it all Faith watched her with an eerily cold expression that was malevolently kind. Evie had the wild impulse to hug her, to inhale her scent of odd things, of rumpled parchment and soured dirt. The bubbles grew, and she wondered if she’d suffocate on them.

            “Just. Like. You.” Faith said, quiet.

            Evie remembered falling, but she couldn’t have said when she hit the ground. She remembered being carried, voices about her head, but they were heard just long enough to be discarded, acknowledged then cast aside. Everything dipped. Everything swayed.

            In the Bliss, she dreamed. As she dreamed, she remembered.

            _Do you trust me?_

-

            Deputy Ridley stared down at the muddled mess of tracks in front of her, and she swore.

            “Dep,” Eli said, and she shook her head.

            “This is some shit,” she said, and she jabbed at the scene before them. “You see this?”

            “I see it,” Eli agreed.

            She didn’t want to wrap her head around it, but one thing that was certain was that the data couldn’t lie. When one followed a certain path or trail, it couldn’t lie to you. Sooner or later, you found the person leaving behind their footprints.

            “This here seems to say she didn’t struggle one bit. That she just up and walked out of the fucking bunker, met up with them, and left.”

            “That’s what it looks like, yeah,” said Eli, squatting down.

            Rook wanted to swear again, but something said it wouldn’t help. Her fingers twitched, and she itched for a cigarette. Hadn’t smoked in two years, didn’t want to start up again. The Toyota pick-up had some menthols in the jockey box. Menthols. She didn’t want to start up again on some fucking menthols.

            A lie. Kind of wanted to start again, despite the menthols.

            She looked back down and gripped her hips tight, digging her nails into the leather of the belt. She’d been so sure she was about to do something, that _Jacob_ had finally gotten her right where he wanted her, then this?

            She wouldn’t entertain the notion of Evie actually thinking she’d manage on her own. She’d finally taken the time to learn how to shoot, but even then Rook wouldn’t think her good for a fight for a long time, if ever. She’d hoped that maybe, if it came to Evie’s life or the bad guy’s life, she’d be able to maybe squeeze a trigger. She didn’t _seem_ entirely capable, although she was resilient. The idiot hadn’t even put shoes on when she left. Bare feet sunk in the soft earth of summer rain. If Rook read the tracks right, –and she most-assuredly fucking did – she was flat footed and a God Damn pain in Rook’s ass since the moment they met.

            If she wasn’t so fucking _innocent_ …

            Something caught her eye amid the mud, abused grass, and the steps of many feet that’d embarked on this trek. Something that wasn’t quite right, something that didn’t…belong.

            Another set of footprints, bare. High arches. Rook tilted her head and squatted down beside Eli, thoughtful. She looked from the footprint to Eli, then back again. She itched for a cigarette. Maybe she’d snag one from one of the abandoned shops in town rather than suffer menthols. Was that considered looting? Maybe she’d leave cash in the till, should things ever get back to normal here.

            If there was a time that things could _ever_ get back to normal, after shit like this.

            “One of these things is not like the other,” she murmured, gesturing.

            Eli hummed in agreement. “You recognize those, dep?”

            Rook felt an odd churning in her guts that didn’t have anything to do with Jacob brainwashing her. “…Yeah. Yeah, I know who else was here last night.”

            And if that wretch had her claws in Evie, things were going to get really fucking irritating, really quick.

**Author's Note:**

> A special thanks to my patrons: Sylarana, Inky-Starlight, Heather Feather, Duhaunt6, Superlurk, Mendacious Bean, Laura G, Dancy_85, Cecily, and Evertonem! <3 
> 
> You can find me on Tumblr as Elfnerdherder --come say hello!


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